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
The data is representing a frequency (tone) and amplitude (volume) of a wave output at any specific moment in time. This can be resolved as a sequence of simple voltage levels at a known repeating rate.
The output system converts those voltages into a representation of the original input wave, and feeds it to a speaker, which oscillates according to the input wave, producing actual sound.
So the sample rate of audio is how many voltage levels per second are represented, and the encoding defines how many bits represent each momentary voltage. That then effects the quality of the reproduced audio.
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