2. The Story of Sound
In the previous chapter, you got your first taste of the Core Audio API: what it offers, how to add it to a project, and how to call its functions. Now it’s time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture: the problems that Core Audio addresses in the first place.
This chapter introduces the basic science of sound, what it is and how it works. As it turns out, the digital nature of computers makes them not well suited to processing continuous analog signals. This leads to the idea of sampling a signal, or chopping the smooth sound waves into discrete values frequently enough that the human ear can’t notice the difference. This chapter covers how these samples are represented and arranged in digital form.
It’s one ...
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