4.1.5

Representing Sound

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Representing Sound

Sound travels as analogue waves, but computers need to convert this to a digital format.

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Sampling

  • When sound is recorded by a computer its amplitude is recorded at regular intervals.
  • The value of the amplitude at each sample is stored as a binary value.
  • The number of bits used to store each sample is known as the sample size.
  • The number of samples taken per second is known as the sampling rate.
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Quality of audio

  • Increasing the sampling rate will increase the quality of the audio.
  • Increasing the sample size will also increase the quality of the audio.
  • Unfortunately, increasing these make the file size larger.
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Bit rate and file size

  • The bit rate is the amount of data stored per second of audio.
  • The bit rate is calculated as bitrate = sample rate ×\times sample size.

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