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BeginnersGuideToSoundMusic

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Beginners Guide To Sound & Music In Computing

The world of digital sound and music is a wide ranging area, but could be seen to be split two ways:-

• Sample Based Sound - Where sound is recorded as a series of numerical values called samples taken periodically specifying the  ?amplitude of the waveform that makes the sound. e.g. WAVE format.
• Described Sound - Where data describes how to generate sound. It could be parameters for synthesis, it could be musical notes and when to play them and for how long; MIDI is this kind of idea. MP3 is also a bit like this - it describes the waveforms in a way that can be used to generate samle data.

Computers have been used in sound proccessing for many years now, and the hardware to create high quality results has fallen greatly in price. Now virtually all PCs ship with sound cards which are capable of playing both MIDI and sample based (WAVE) sound.

Applications of sound on computers include music composition and playback, synthesis, analysing sound (e.g. speech recgonition) and entertainment.
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