Python: write a wav file into numpy float array

>>> from scipy.io.wavfile import read
>>> a = read("adios.wav")
>>> numpy.array(a[1],dtype=float)
array([ 128.,  128.,  128., ...,  128.,  128.,  128.])

Typically it would be bytes which are then ints... here we just convert it to float type.

You can read about read here: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/tutorial/io.html#module-scipy.io.wavfile

Seven years after the question was asked...

import wave
import numpy

# Read file to get buffer                                                                                               
ifile = wave.open("input.wav")
samples = ifile.getnframes()
audio = ifile.readframes(samples)

# Convert buffer to float32 using NumPy                                                                                 
audio_as_np_int16 = numpy.frombuffer(audio, dtype=numpy.int16)
audio_as_np_float32 = audio_as_np_int16.astype(numpy.float32)

# Normalise float32 array so that values are between -1.0 and +1.0                                                      
max_int16 = 2**15
audio_normalised = audio_as_np_float32 / max_int16