Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

Sound is a pressure wave or a longitudinal wave that travels through the air with compressions and rarefactions. Compressions are the regions with higher air pressure, whereas rarefactions are the regions with lower air pressure. 

> Sound is propagating from left to right in Figure 1.

**Frequency** is a measure of how rapidly a signal changes, whereas, the **wavelength** of a waveform, is the reciprocal of its frequency. More rapid changes in a signal imply higher frequency and shorter wavelength.

An analogue wave is a continuous signal that measures the change in amplitude over time. Fundamentally, anything measured is an analogue quantity, including the human voice, the brightness of an image, a thermometer reading, light sensors, air pressure, etc. The analogue signal can be represented as a sine wave, as shown in Figure 2.

A digital signal is a discrete-time, quantized amplitude signal that can take on values from only a finite set of different values. It measures the change in amplitude as a sequence of discrete values, as shown in Figure 3.  Typically, a computer's input device receives an analogue signal and converts it into a digital signal. Then the digital signal is stored or processed inside the computer, as shown in Figure 4. 

In this lesson, you will learn how sound is represented in a computer system.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Sound Representation

What is sound?

Analogue signals

Digital