Representing Digital Media Flashcards
What is a microphone?
A transducer, converts audio (sound waves) into an electrical signal
What are some ways of creating digital audio?
Sampling and synthesis
What is the anatomy of audio?
Sine wave (S(t)=a sin(2pi f(t-theta))
a is amplitude
f is frequency
t- theta is the phase
What does amplitude, frequency, and phase relate to sound?
Amplitude relates to the loudness of the sound
Frequency is related to the perceived pitch
Phase can depend on the relative location of the sound
Can any periodic function be expressed as a sum of sine waves? What about non periodic?
Yes
Yes just make the period as long as the signal
What is dB-SPL?
Sound pressure level
A relative logarithmic unit relative to the 20 micropascals
=20log(sound/threshold)
What are the hearing frequency limits!
16 Hz to 20 kHz
How does the upper bound limit for hearing change?
Varies between people and steadily decreases with age
What does digitizing sound involve?
Taking samples at a fixed rate and recording them
What happens when the sampling rate is too slow or too fast?
Too slow means it’s inaccurate
Too fast means the file is very large
What does the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem say?
The sampling interval must be less that or equal to half a period
Should sample periodic signal at least twice the frequency
If the frequency of a periodic signal is 10 Hz what should the sampling be at minimum?
20 Hz minimum
What is bit depth? What does a high bit depth mean?
determines the number of possible amplitude values we can record for each audio sample
higher means more accurate sample
What is a bit depth of less than 8 used for?
Can be used to record physical processes like blood pressure, heartbeat, motion due to walking or running (not sound)
What is a bit depth of 8 used for?
telephones, sometimes quantization noise can be heard
What is a bit depth of 16 used for?
High quality sound
CDs, MP3, DAT etc
What is a bit depth of 24 used for?
DVD-Audio, DTS
often used before or during mastering (sound processing/editing)
Combining bit depth and bit rate gives you what?
bit rate
What format is uncompressed audio typically saved in?
.wav
What is lossless vs lossy audio compression?
lossless is similar to text lossless compression
lossy removes imperceptible sounds, and reduces bit rate
What is codec? Where did the word come from?
Compression and decompression algorithms for audio (and video)
“compressor” and “decompressor”
What are some examples of codecs? Are they lossy or lossless?
FLAC, lossless (using a combination of run-length and Huffman encoding), used for archiving high quality audio, 62% comrpession
MP3, lossy, 13% compression, uses psychoacoustics, Huffman encoding, and lower bit rates (mobile devices)
AAC, lossy, 14% compression, Uses psychoacoustics, Huffman encoding, and lower bit rates, better quality than MP3 (apple and modern smartphones)