Running Average of a Massive data set

So I have a data file containing 5 seconds of sound data, where I want to smooth the data with a running average function and then use the Fast Fourier Transform function in MATLAB in order to pinpoint the amplitude spikes that should be a tuning fork and an out of tune instrument. The data has 20,000 popints, however, and the methods I've tried so far accidentially erase the information I want. Is there a way to make a running average function manually for that many data points?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Well 20,000 points is far from massive. Maybe if it were 10,000 times that big. 20k is actually pretty small. Anyway you can use the conv() function.

windowWidth = 101; % an odd number.
kernel = ones(1, windowWidth) / windowWidth;
smoothedSignal = conv(signal, kernel, 'same');

You can also try the movmean() function if you have a recent version of MATLAB.

[Duncan Cross]

It's the biggest one I've had to work with, so it seems massive to me. But your code does smooth it pretty well, thank you!