1.5 Theory Paragraph 1.

5 - Introduction to wo rking w ith sampled sound

In oth er wo rds, there is a tempo ral distance of 1/2 4 of a second betwe en one
frame and the next. a gap of app roximately 0 .0417 seconds. Likew ise, on a
compact disc, the re are 44,100 samples in each second of music. In t his case,
the te mporal distance betw een one sample and the next is 1/4410 0t h of a
second, o r approximate ly 0.000023 seconds. (The higher the sampling rate, the
more accurate the representation of the stored sound. Compact Disc techno logy
dates back to the early 80's; nowadays, one can fi nd oneself worki ng w it h
sampling rates of 96,000 or even 192,000 samples per second.) This series of
numbers generates motio n, in the form of a wave, wh ich ultimately produces a
physical wave by moving the molecules in the air around you .
We should take a moment to clarify t he distinctio n between the sampling
fr equency and t he freque ncy of a waveform . When talking about waveform
fr equency, one of t he t hree basic parameters of sound, "frequency" refers
to the number of oscillatio ns th at occur per second. The term "sampl ing
frequency," on the other hand, uses the wo rd "frequency" to refer to the
number of samples per second rather tha n t he nu mber of cycles per second.
The more commo nly used term fo r th is concept is "sam pling rate," but you w ill
encounter both. The number of samples needed to captu re one oscillation of a
period ic d ig ital waveform wil l change based upon t he sampling fre quency being
used. We w ill retu rn to a deeper discussion of both terms in Chapter 5.

On disk storage of sampled sounds is not restricted to sounds created using

compute r synthesis; it is also very commo n to record sound from an external
source, digitally convert it, and store it to disk, o r to import already recorded
sound from other media, and stor e it to d isk. There are many diffe rent fo rmats
for encoding such audio f iles, including:

- Uncompressed audio formats such as WAV, A IFFand BWF

- Losslessformats that compress fi les w ithout sacrificing quality, such as FLAC,
lossless WMA, and App le Lossless
- Formats that use lossy techn iques in order to achieve smaller footpr ints at the
expense of sound quality, such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis. and standard WMA

WAV (Wave) and AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) fi les, along wit h most
of the other fo rmats. provide a header wi t h space for an ID, a sampling rate,
the number of channels, the number of bits per sample, and the length of the
audio data, along with any othe r metadata needed for decoding and catalog-
ing. You can always convert a sound fil e fro m one standard forma t to another
with fo rmat-specific editi ng programs. Many audio editors are also able to read
and save audio files in differe nt formats.
An audio file can be monaural (mono), stereo or mul tichann el. A monau ral
audio f ile contai ns a single sequence of numbers t hat encode its dig ital wave-
fo rm. A stereo fi le, o n th e oth er hand, contains two dig ita l sequences that
can be converted in parallel, one fo r th e left channel, and right channel, each
representi ng one speaker of a pair, or one headphone channel. A mult ichannel
fi le conta ins a variable nu mber of sequences (usually between 4 and 8) t hat can
be sent to the same number of speakers. We' ll talk abo ut mult i-channel sound
in more detail in Chapter 5.
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