Digitised Sound
- Sound is input via a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) port to be processed by computer.
- Analogue to digital converter to transform analogue input into digital form (binary pattern which can be stored and processed)
- Undesirable sounds can be edited out
- Sound in analogue form may be represented by wave forms with the height represented by e.g. a 16-bit binary code. More frequent samples -> sound more faithfully represented
Bit-mapped Graphics
- pixel (picture element) -> squares on the grid of a VDU screen
- monochrome -> 1-bit in memory to represent each pixel
- colour screen -> 1-byte in memory to represent each pixel, therefore 256 colours
- memory used for graphics is additional to RAM and is supplied on graphics card
- 1MB graphics card means that 1MB of memory is available to represent a full screen image
- bitmaps -> huge files, bad distortion
Data
- numbers, text, graphics, sound (0s & 1s inside computer)
- information coded and structured for subsequent processing
NB codes are meaningless if they have no context
Information
- data with context and / or meaning