When you talk about a sample, what does that actually mean? Like I recognize that the frequency of oscillations will tell me the pitch of something, but how does that actually translate to a chunk of data that is useful?

You mention a sample being stored as a number, which makes sense, but how is that number utilized? Again assuming uncompressed, if my sample “value” comes up as 420, does that include all of the necessary components of that sound bite in a 1/44100th of a second? How would a sample at value 421 compare? Is this like a RGB type situation where you’d have multiple values corresponding to different attributes of the sample (amplitude, frequencies, and I’m sure other things)? Is a single sample actually intelligible in isolation?

Manufacturing

It’s just a population map

My response to your question, is another question:

what?

I think we’re going to need a bit of an explanation here