SLR 13 - coding sound and music Flashcards
How does digital to analogue conversion work?
- you use a digital to analogue converter
the device reads a bit pattern representing an analogue signal - it outputs an alternating, analogue electrical current
What’s the difference between analogue and digital data?
analogue is continuous (smooth curves) whereas whereas digital is discrete (sharp edges and vertical drops)
What can analogue sound waves do?
can take ay values and can change as frequently as required
What can digital sound waves do?
must always take one of a specified range of values and can only change value at specified intervals
How does analogue to digital conversion work?
- sensors (temp sensors and microphone) output an analogue signal
- Computers use ADCs convert them
- the device samples the analogue signal at regular intervals
What is frequency?
- given in Hertz
- it determines the number samples taken per second
What does a larger number of frequencies mean?
Better reproduction of an analogue signal
How do computers represent sound?
as a sequence of samples, each taking a discrete digital value
What is sampling rate and what is it measured in?
the number of samples per second (hertz)
What is sample resolution?
the number of bits allocated to each sample
A higher sample resolution means…
greater audio quality and increased file size
What is Nyquist’s theorem?
the sampling rate of a digital audio file must be at least twice the frequency of the sound so that the sound may be accurately represented
What does MIDI stand for?
Musical Instrument Digital Interface
What is MIDI used with?
electronic musical instruments which can be connected to computers
What does MIDI store instead of sound samples?
a series of event messages, each representing an event in a piece of music
What information could event messages contain?
- the duration of a note
- the instrument with which the note is played
- the volume of the note
- if a note should be sustained
Ads of MIDI?
- allows for easy manipulation of music without a loss of quality
- the duration of notes can be changed and they can be transposed
- MIDI have smaller file sizes and lossless (no info lost)
Disads of MIDI?
MIDI can’t be used for storing speech and sometimes results in a less realistic sound
What are the two types of compression?
lossy and lossless
What is lossy compression?
some information is lost to reduce the file size
could be by reducing the resolution or lowering sample resolution in an audio file
What is lossless compression?
there is no loss of information when using lossless compression
reduces file size without reducing quality
What are two types of lossless compression?
- run length encoding
- dictionary-based methods
What is RLE (run length encoding)
reduces the size of the file by removing repeated information and replacing it with one occurrence of the repeated info followed by the number of times it is to be repeated
What is dictionary based lossless compression?
a dictionary containing repeated data is appended to a file