Digital Sound

Question 1

1. Sample

Answer 1

Sound is caused by vibrating objects that create pressure waves in the air. Digital sound recordings capture this continuous wave and divide it into discrete segments. Then, a value is assigned to each segment.Sample heightis the value of a single segment.

Question 2

2. Bit depth

Answer 2

Recording programs have to decide how much memory they should allocate to store the value of each sample. Thebit depthis the amount of memory used. 8-bit sound uses eight bits (or one byte) to store the value of each sample. 16-bit sound uses two bytes per sample.

Question 3

3. Sampling rate

Answer 3

Another setting that affects sound recording quality is the sampling rate. Thesampling rateis how many individual samples are taken each second. This rate is measured in hertz (Hz).

Question 4

4. Frame rate

Answer 4

Videos are made of a sequence of still images shown in rapid succession. Each individual image is called a frame. Frame rate is a measure of how many frames are shown each second. Most digital videos have a frame rate of about 30 frames per second.

Question 5

5. Resolution

Answer 5

Resolution is a measure of how many pixels wide and tall each frame of a digital video is. The higher the resolution, the clearer the image will be.

Question 6

6. Color depth

Answer 6

Color depth is a measure of how much memory the computer uses to display colors. Eight-bit color images use one byte of data for each pixel. This means each pixel can be one of 256 colors. 24-bit color, uses three bytes for each pixel. It can use millions of different colors.