This is definitely key - one startup I worked for was messing around with live voice capture and processing, voice recognition, etc.. by and large the libraries

This is definitely key - one startup I worked for was messing around with live voice capture and processing, voice recognition, etc.. by and large the libraries we had access to that could help do tiny manipulations, cutting, processing of the waveform data was primarily C. We wrote most of our code in C++ because we could directly call C functions and use header files directly. This was 15 years ago, but I honestly don't know what language I would use today. It's funny but sometimes binary data handling isn't a particular language's strong suit simply because they don't have the primitives to handle it, or if they do, the APIs to handle them are awkward or unnecessarily verbose. It's kinda neat that in C/C++ you can take a 1MB byte buffer and pass it to a function starting at 30% in. In other languages its like you have to pass in the whole thing and another parameter to tell it where to start. I get that's why C/C++ is in the situation it's in (security - but that's why I don't use C/C++ to handle web requests), but sometimes tasks need that.