this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
39 points (91.5% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26968 readers
963 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

If a recording of someones very rare voice is representable by mp4 or whatever, could monkeys typing out code randomly exactly reproduce their exact timbre+tone+overall sound?

I don't get how we can get rocks to think + exactly transcribe reality in the ways they do!

Edit: I don't get how audio can be fossilized/reified into plaintext

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

But how can it capture perfectly my exact voice or the exact timbre of whatever stuff is playing. Like, its mind-blowing to me and I have nothing i can analogize it to. Its incredible we can even take pictures with pixels, sound is just a whole notha level that astounds me

[–] invertedspear@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago

Maybe it helps to know that it can’t perfectly capture your voice. It can get close enough no human can tell the difference, but it’s still not perfect. First of all it has a sampling rate. To make this more understandable let’s think of a sample rate of 1 sample per second. Think of two speakers playing at the same time. One is playing your favorite song, the other is playing the exact note of that some for one second each and only changing notes every second. It’s going to somewhat mimic your song, but it’s going to be terrible. Now imagine that second speaker makes 4 samples every second, now it’s playing your song a quarter of a second at a time. Sounds a lot more like your song, but in the same way stop motion looks a lot like movement but isn’t right. Note up that sample rate to 100s or thousands of samples a second, now you’re getting to the point you can’t tell the difference, but it still can’t be perfect, because it’s still based on a sample rate.

If you can grok pictures from pixels, you can picture the same thing. If you averaged a picture out to one giant pixel, it’s unrecognizable, 4,8,16 pixels, maybe a simple icon starts to approximate into something recognizable. That little icon in your browser tab is usually 32 x 32 pixels. 1024 pixels total, and we barely consider that an image. It’s all about pixel count (sample rate). When you zoom in, you find that it’s not perfect, you always get to the point of individual pixels, unlike optical zoom where you can zoom almost indefinitely as long as you can collect enough light.

[–] Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Everything about the exact timbre of your voice is captured in the waveform that represents it. To the extent that the sampling rate and bit depth are good enough to mimic your actual voice without introducing digital artefacts (something analogous to a pixelated image) that's all it takes to reproduce any sound with arbitrary precision.

Timbre is the result of having a specific set of frequencies playing simultaneously, that is characteristic of the specific shape and material properties of the object vibrating (be it a guitar string, drum skin, or vocal chords).

As for how multiple frequencies can "exist" simultaneously at a single instant in time, you might want to read up on Fourier's theorem and watch 3Blue1Brown's brilliant series on differential equations that explores Fourier series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

It's doesn't get your exact voice. Your speech gets compressed into digital "steps" that closely mimic the continuous "analog" output of your voice.