Read the article by Christopher Dobrian on Digital Audio.

Make sure you understand the meaning of the following terms:
simple harmonic motion, amplitude, frequency, fundamental mode of vibration, harmonics (overtones, partials), harmonic series, spectrum, amplitude envelope, loudness/amplitude, pitch/frequency, decibel, analog-to-digital converter, digital-to-analog, converter, digital sampling, Nyquist theorem/rate/frequency, sampling rate, aliasing/foldover, quantization, quantization precision, signal-to-quantization noise ratio, clipping.

If you don’t fully understand the explanation of those terms in the article, you’ll need to do some research to learn more about the things you don’t understand. Come to class with specific questions regarding any topics, italicized terms, or concepts discussed in the article that are unclear to you. You can also posts questions or comments about the article on the class MessageBoard. Check the MessageBoard on Wednesday evening to see if there are any questions by others there that you can help by answering.