Right now you're listening to the sound of my voice on some digital audio device.

In fact, almost all the audio you consume today was digitally recorded or edited at some point in the process.

But sound is inherently analog. How does sound, the movement of air, become converted into ones and zeros.

And once sound is digitally converted, how is it distributed? And how is the digitization of sound changed the business of music and audio.

Learn more about digital audio, how it works and how it changed how we consume audio on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. Pretty much all audio recorded nowadays is digital or has been digitized in some form.

Even if you purchase a vinyl record,

the playback mechanism might be analog,

but the original courting and mixing was probably done digitally.

The words you're listening to right now

were digitally recorded and edited, and you are listening to it on some sort of digital device, most probably a smartphone.

So how does digital audio work?

We first have to start with the basics of what's happening. So how does digital audio work?

We first have to start with the basics of what sound is.

Sound is air pressure in the form of waves.

You've probably seen a graphical representation of a sound wave before.

It's a pattern of up and down lines that are in a

sinusoidal pattern. The key thing to understand about sound waves and the thing that

defines what anything analog is is that they're continuous. If something is continuous, it means

that there are no gaps. Imagine drawing a line on a piece of paper with a pen.

At every point in the line there's ink. There are no gaps between any two

points in the line. If something is not continuous, then it's considered to be discrete.

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