If images are composed of the horizontal and vertical formation of pixels on a screen, what is “sound” as a data type?

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I’m not a CS graduate or anything. I am a self-taught developer. This is what I’ve been wondering quite a while now.

I kinda know how images work. Yes, the format specifications might differ. A PNG file and a JPG file are different about how they *store* the image data. However, at the end of the day, images are the horizontal and vertical formation of pixels on a screen.

Yet, I do not know what a “sound” is. Images have a unit like “pixel”, what is the unit of sound?

Please note that I’m talking about “sound” as data, not as a physical event.

In: Technology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Audio sample point is pretty much analogous to image pixel.

Audio is a wave. The data stored is the position of the wave at that instant.

With something like Audacity you can zoom in close enough to see these individual data points.
Like this: https://i.imgur.com/6K494Jk.png
Each point is one sample. Usually there are 44100 samples in one second of audio (44.1 kHz sample rate).

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