Thanks for the answers guys, but I still don’t really understand how sound can go at the speed of light, and IMO I think it took a lot longer than we think.
Don’t believe me? Imagine we have no advanced tech that we have today, and across world voice calls don’t exist. Imagine how fucking difficult it would be to make the sound of your voice go at light speed across Earth.
For example imagine you’re at a park with your friend and across world vc’s don’t exist. You’re speaking to each other through the pipe with the two cups at each end, and you want to invent a way to communicate across the world
The fact they did it is awesome. It sounds impossible. And at the time I have no doubt the majority of the world thought it was impossible. But we always think it’s impossible, until it’s invented.
OP below
I always thought that the sound travels at the speed of light but then it hit me that it’s not light, it’s sound, so I had to post this.
OP above
Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound. It’s just sound in a different form, or it wouldn’t be sound at the other end.
Who was the first person to convert sound to the speed of light?
Edit2: I still think there’s something you’re not telling me guys 🤔😂
Edit3: to the few haters who downvoted my reply to the comment when I said ‘no shit’ when someone compared this to paper travelling at the speed of light, get a brain. Sound doesn’t weigh anything.
Edit4: u/mitchrsmert fr? If sound has mass how can it travel at the speed of light?
In: 627
Other people have answered your question that sound can be converted into digital, so I’ll go one further: almost everything you can think of can be converted into digital data and then sent over wires at the speed of light.
We start with the concept of digital data. For most technology, digital means converting information into binary, or some combination of 1’s and 0’s. This allows us to represent information as a series of high voltages (1’s) and low voltages (0’s) to allow it to be sent over a wire.
The first concept to digitize is the concept of integers. We can make them binary by changing them to base 2. 13 in base 10 can be thought of as 10 + 3. However, it is also 8 + 4 + 1, which gives us the binary number 1101.
Next is the concept of negative integers. The easy but not quite accurate way to explain them is we put a 1 at the front if it is negative and a 0 at the front if it is positive. When dealing with digital concepts, you usually deal with a fixed number of 1’s or 0’s, usually in groups of 8. So 5 is 00000101 and -5 is 10000101. The reason this isn’t quite accurate is if we did it this way, then we would have both 0 and -0, and that’s not ideal. So we slightly modify by shifting the negative numbers using a concept called two’s complement that I won’t get into.
Next is the concept of non-integer numbers, which we call floats. To encode 8.3 into binary, we think of it as 83 * 10^-1. Then, we encode the 83 and the -1 to binary separately and then combine them into one binary block. Like negative numbers, I’m glossing over some details so it’s not completely accurate but this should be enough for you to get the idea.
Next is the concept of text, which we call strings. Text started with ASCII, which used 7 bits to describe the English alphabet and numbers. ASCII uses a lookup table, so a capital A is 65, or 1000001. Eventually we created Unicode, which is 32 bits instead of 7. Unicode has three different versions, one is 32 bits per character, one is 16 bits per chunk with a character being one or two chunks, and one is 8 bits per chunk with a character being 1-4 chunks.
Finally, when you are a software programmer like I am, you make your own “datatypes”. A datatype is a mapping from a concept to how to represent it in binary. However, almost everything you make is going to be a combination of integers, floats, bools, and strings.
So to answer your question, for sound, you need some device to convert the information of sound into a series of integers. These integers are then converted into binary 1’s and 0’s, and then sent over a wire. A 1 is sent over the wire using high voltage and a 0 is sent over the wire using low voltage. The other side gets this information, converts it back into binary 1’s and 0’s, and then has digital speakers that are able to read the 1’s and 0’s and use them figure out what sounds to emit.
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