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Digital Audio Representation
Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Note: Audio is typically represented in a digital form using Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM.
On the left there is an example of a sine wave. The red line represents the original analog signal, with the blue dots representing the data points in the PCM encoded version. A similar idea is happening on the right, but with a more complex waveform.
During the conversion process from analog to digital, better know as "quantization", the amplitude of the analog signal is converted into digital data points at regular intervals. In this example, a simple rounding algorithm is used. Do however note that there are more complicated algorithms, but you could spend many hours just talking about those alone, and the specifics aren't particularly important here.
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