Due to the essence of digital information transfer, there will always be a loss of information when translating analogue information into digital, as the analogue form of information is ambiguous to interpretation, whereas the definition of something being digital is that it is not ambiguous. This concept can be seen in the example of phones, and how they convey the analogue aspect of one’s voice into digital information, which is transmitted through digitally-reading computers, into a new analogue voice for the person listening to interpret. Despite the advanced technology of today, phone calls cannot exactly replicate someone’s voice, even to the extent that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize who is speaking purely by their voice over the phone. This is a result of the digitization of the human voice in order to transfer it across the phone lines. In order to make phone calls reasonably efficient, there is a range of frequencies that the analogue-to-digital converter in phones is equipped to process, which covers the majority of human sounds, especially those in speech. However, the con of converting the countless intricacies that make up each individual’s unique voice into a digital format is that many of those are lost through the translation. Any of the frequencies in someone’s voice that fall outside the converter’s range or ones that are ambiguous in their frequency are changed in the converter to the closest frequency within the range, resulting in differences in a person’s voice over the phone versus in person. The obvious advantage of phone calls has clearly outweighed the small but noticeable negative of replicating something so complex as the analogue human voice to a simple digital form.Â
Learning Objectives:Â
- Demonstrate the process of digitization as it applies to text and sound, including the tradeoffs that must be considered in the process
- Contrast the digital representation of an object or concept with the ‘natural’ object. What is gained, what is lost?Â