From the course: Digital Audio Foundations
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Frequency and amplitude
- Two of the most important aspects of sound that can be measured using numbers are frequency and amplitude. Let's start with frequency. The simplest possible type of sound, called a Sine Wave, has only one frequency at a time. We perceive that frequency as a pitch on a spectrum from low to high. While the terms frequency and pitch are sometimes interchanged, pitched usually has a more musical meaning while frequency refers specifically to the measured rate at which a sound wave fluctuates. That's different from the speed of sound. As an analogy, imagine your at the beach watching the waves hit the shore. We could measure the speed of the waves, which is how fast they move toward the beach or we could measure the frequency of the waves, which is how often a wave arrives. For example, if a wave hits the shore every second, the frequency is one wave per second. We can compare the frequency of ocean waves to the frequency of sound waves. We measure the pattern of high and low air…
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