Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?
Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?
MP3 (or WAV, OGG, FLAC etc.) provide a way to encode polyphony and stereo and such into a sequence of bytes.
And then separately, there’s Unicode (or ASCII) for encoding letters into bytes. These are just big tables which say e.g.:
01000001 = uppercase ‘A’
01000010 = uppercase ‘B’
01100001 = lowercase ‘A’
So, what your text editor does, is that it looks at the sequence of bytes that MP3 encoded and then it just looks into its table and somewhat erronously interprets it as individual letters.
Most binary-to-text encodings don’t attempt to make the text human-readable—they’re just intended to transmit the data over a text-only medium to a recipient who will decode it back to the original binary format.
I do understand I’m not able to read it myself, I’m more curious about the architecture of how that data is represented and stored and conceptually how such representation is practically organized/reified…
The original binary format is split into six-bit chunks (e.g., 100101), which in decimal format correspond to the integers from 0 to 63. These are just mapped to letters in order:
000000 = A,
000001 = B,
000010 = C,
000011 = D,
etc.—it goes through the capital letters first, then lower-case letters, then digits, then “+” and “/”. It’s so simple you could do it by hand from the above description, if you were looking at the data in binary format.
Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?
Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?
There’s two things at play here.
MP3 (or WAV, OGG, FLAC etc.) provide a way to encode polyphony and stereo and such into a sequence of bytes.
And then separately, there’s Unicode (or ASCII) for encoding letters into bytes. These are just big tables which say e.g.:
01000001= uppercase ‘A’01000010= uppercase ‘B’01100001= lowercase ‘A’So, what your text editor does, is that it looks at the sequence of bytes that MP3 encoded and then it just looks into its table and somewhat erronously interprets it as individual letters.
Most binary-to-text encodings don’t attempt to make the text human-readable—they’re just intended to transmit the data over a text-only medium to a recipient who will decode it back to the original binary format.
I do understand I’m not able to read it myself, I’m more curious about the architecture of how that data is represented and stored and conceptually how such representation is practically organized/reified…
The original binary format is split into six-bit chunks (e.g., 100101), which in decimal format correspond to the integers from 0 to 63. These are just mapped to letters in order:
etc.—it goes through the capital letters first, then lower-case letters, then digits, then “+” and “/”. It’s so simple you could do it by hand from the above description, if you were looking at the data in binary format.