How are radio stations able to turn digital music into radio waves?
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Digital music is basically a long list of air pressures. Quite literally when it comes to CDs, and an mp3 is a list of instructions to calculate the air pressures. There are 40.000 measurements a second to be exact. Each radio station has an assigned frequency. When the air pressure is high it sends a slightly higher frequency, when it is low it is a slightly lower frequency. Messing with the frequency is called modulation. A normal radio wave has about a hundred million positive peaks per second. Your radio can just count the number of peaks in a 40.000th of a second. It knows that on average the speaker should be in a neutral position. If it counts a few more it pushes the speaker outwards, a few less and it pushes the speaker inwards.
Counting isn’t quite how the radios work but it’s a good enough analogy.
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