eli5 How do phone calls work? And how is human voice converted to digital signals to get transferred

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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?

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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