AUDIO STUDIES WEEK 4 SAMPLING THEOREM

Ah, at last I get my head wrapped firmly around the idea of sampling rate and bit depth, I hope. The concept of bit depth determining the amplitude resolution now makes sense as the amplitude over time determines the wave shape. I presume that the high rate of sampling coupled with the large number amplitude increments possible even at 16BD and 44.1kHz SR, is what allows accurate representation of the very complex sounds (wave shapes) that comprise music, although the graphic portrayals we have been looking at give the impression that everything comes out sounding like a sine wave, ha ha. This is another difficult concept to get used to: how do ears, speakers, microphones and digital representations reproduce complex sound structures? In the analogue realm, surely all things do is vibrate, in the digital they’re just on or off; how then do we hear a full orchestra and its individual components? I think someone brought this up in Concepts of Music this week also and although Stephen explained it to some extent, it’s a difficult thing to visualise (and some of us need to visualise to understand). I confess to having had some difficulty in completing the practical exercise on time this week. I’m unfashionably unfamiliar with the Mac environment and this is slowing me down – the actual software presents no problem for me, just finding documents. Silly, I know. I’ll get used to it in time.