In response to http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/2010-10-14-Fun-with-wav/

wav.py

import sys
from collections import namedtuple
from struct import unpack, calcsize

Header = namedtuple('Header', 'id totallength wavefmt format pcm channels frequency bytes_per_second bytes_by_capture bits_per_sample data bytes_in_data')
header_format = '4si8sihhiihh4si'
header_len    = calcsize(header_format)

def read_wav(fname):
    "Read in a wav file with simple header parsing, and return the sum of the absolute value of its samples"
    with open(fname,'rb') as f:
        raw = f.read(header_len)
        header = Header._make(unpack(header_format, raw))

        if(header.id != 'RIFF'):
            raise Exception("Unexpected id %s" % header.id)

        body = f.read()
        return sum(abs(ord(c)) for c in body)
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    print read_wav(sys.argv[0])

sys.argv[0] should be sys.argv[1]

ps
thanks for the code snippet.