Digital Representation of Sound

Digital sound is a numeric representation of analogue sound waves, used for storage, manipulation and playback.
The process of converting analogue sound to digital is called digitisation. It involves sampling and quantising.

Sampling is the process of taking snapshots of the amplitude of an analogue signal at regular intervals.
The rate of sampling is defined by the sampling frequency or sampling rate. It is generally measured in hertz (Hz).
The Nyquist theorem states that the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency of the original signal to accurately represent the original sound.
The larger the sampling rate, the higher the quality of the converted digital sound, but it requires more storage space.

Quantisation is the process of assigning numerical values to each sample taken during sampling.
The accuracy of quantisation is based on the bit depth. The higher the bit depth, the more accurately the original analogue waveform is represented. This leads to higher audio quality but also increases storage requirements.
Common bit depths include 8, 16, 24, and 32 bits per sample.

Encoding involves converting the quantised values into a binary format for storage or transmission.
This binary data can then be decoded to recreate the digital sound for playback or manipulation.

Digital sound, due to its numerical representation, is easier to manipulate, transmit, and store, making it hugely crucial in multimedia, communications, gaming, and music technology.
Knowledge of digital sound is key to understanding compression algorithms used in formats like MP3 and JPG.
Enhanced understanding of digital sound applies to resolving issues related to signal-to-noise ratio, distortion, and audio quality.