I’m an operator/dispatcher and for some reason, no matter how many times I read about this or have it explained to me it doesn’t make sense. How does a soundwave travel through the phone or wireless Internet and make its way across the planet? Somebody please. It’s things like this
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a microphone is a device that turns a soundwave into an electrical signal. That signal then transfers along the wires to a speaker, which works in reverse of the microphone, turning it back into a sound wave. Internet does the same thing ultimately, but with a bunch of other layers of complication we don’t need to get into.
Is there something specific you are confused about?
Basically, when a sound is produced, be it music, speech, or just noise, air is vibrating bouncing into other air molecules in a wave like pattern. Microphones work by vibrating a membrane attached to a magnet suspended in a ring of copper. That movement produces electrical current that is recorded. In old days, it was a magnetic signature on tape, as bumps in grooves on vinyl. As time went on, we recorded it as digital data. That data is recorded and transferred to speakers which acts the exact same way the microphone did, but opposite, where current produces a magnetic field that moves a magnet attached to a membrane to vibrate it reproducing the sound. I can clarify anything you didn’t get in my explanation if I went too fast.
Simple: it doesn’t. Not exactly, anyway.
It will help to provide a brief primer of electromagnetism: a moving magnetic field can induce an electric voltage, and vice-versa.
In a microphone, sound waves cause a magnet to move within an electric coil; the movement of the magnet causes a corresponding electric voltage that — and this is the key — precisely maps to the sound wave that generated it.
This varying voltage can then be saved to a file, transmitted across the internet, and played back on a different computer. This varying voltage then causes a magnet to move back and forth; this magnet is glued to a membrane, and the back-and-forth movement of the membrane moves the air back and forth, which is precisely a sound wave, which you can then hear.
Imagine sound waves are gossip. They travel fast, get converted into digital bits, and are spread by the internet faster
It doesn’t. It is captured by a microphone, digitised, sent around the world as data, then played out through a speaker on the far end.