In this chapter, we have been describing sound as continuous changes of air pressure amplitude. In this sense, sound is an analog phenomenon – a physical phenomenon that could be represented as continuously changing voltages. Computers require that we use a discrete representation of sound. In particular, when sound is captured as data in a computer, it is represented as a list of numbers. Capturing sound in a form that can be handled by a computer is a process called analog-to-digital conversion, whereby the amplitude of a sound wave is measured at evenly-spaced intervals in time – typically 44,100 times per second, or even more. Details of analog-to-digital conversion are covered in Chapter 5. For now, it suffices to think of digitized sound as a list of numbers. Once a computer has captured sound as a list of numbers, a whole host of mathematical operations can be performed on the sound to change its loudness, pitch, frequency balance, and so forth. We’ll begin to see how this works in the following sections.
2.1.5 Digitizing Sound Waves