I am having difficulty wrapping my head around how do phone calls actually work, like does it work using packets like the internet. If so then how is the human voice covered to digital signals, with such different and random voices in different languages how is it possible to map all of that to a binary code?
In: Technology
> different languages how is it possible to map all of that to a binary code?
That’s not how it works, it could be gibberish for all the microphone cares. Your phone has a microphone, they work like the opposite of a speaker (instead of making sound by moving in and out it recorded sound by being moved in/out), the recorded movement of the microphone is what’s recorded binary (how fast/deep the movement of the microphone’s membrane was), that gets digitally sent to the receiving end where their speakers replicates the movements and thus produces what we hear as vocals.
Sound is a pressure wave. This means a measurable quantity (pressure) that varies over time. The “shape” of that wave is decoded by the brain to interpret that as sound. The digital equipment doesn’t need to do any translation – it simply records the pressure at very quick intervals of time and converts that to a stream of numbers (representing the different pressure). The numbers are sent to another location using electrical networks and those numbers are converted to an electrical signal that matches the pattern of the original wave. This signal is sent to speakers that convert the electrical signal to a pressure wave.
There are not “separate” sounds – all sounds merge into a single pressure wave. It is your ears/brain that breaks this wave down into “speech”, “music”, “noise”, etc etc.
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