Digital audio represents a waveform as a stream of numeric amplitude values called samples

In digital audio, a continuous analog sound wave is converted into a sequence of discrete numbers — samples. Each sample captures the instantaneous amplitude of the wave at a moment in time. The sampling rate (typically 44100 or 48000 Hz) determines how many samples are captured per second. A DSP system reconstructs the analog waveform by playing these numbers back through a D/A converter. In Max/MSP, the scope~ object visualizes hundreds of samples simultaneously as a waveform curve. Compression corresponds to positive sample values; rarefaction to negative values; silence is a sequence of zeros. Amplitude is conventionally bounded between −1 and +1 in software.

Examples

A 440 Hz sine wave at 44100 Hz sampling rate produces about 100 samples per cycle (44100 / 440 ≈ 100). At amplitude 0.5, every sample falls in [−0.5, +0.5].

Assessment

If a digital audio system has a sampling rate of 48000 Hz and you want to represent a 200 Hz sine wave, how many samples represent one complete cycle?