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

Question

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

Answer 1

> 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.