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I just think its crazy I can record a random recording right now or me speaking and that can be stored in what must ultimately be good old-fashioned plaintext or whatever.
Like, thats a rock thinking and turning sound right into stone, wayyyyy more impressive and beneficial than alchemy turning lead into gold
It doesn't get encoded in to plaintext. First, the microphone picks up the sounds, and outputs values for frequencies and intensities. Recording software takes those values, and compresses them down into binary data. Then that binary data is saved onto storage. Depending on your storage, it's then stored magnetically (cassette, floppy, HDD) or as a "lockable" logic gate (USB, SSD) or as laser etched dots and dashes (CD/DVD)
It's not getting turned in to rocks, it's getting written on media.
Also, some number for scale...
My computer has 3.5ghz processors. It can run 3.5 billion instructions every second. To put that in perspective, the smallest unit of time humans can perceive is ~13ms. That processor can run ~270,000 instructions in that time frame. Computers perform very simple tasks, extremely quickly, and it gives the impression of intelligence.
But how can it capture perfectly my exact voice or the exact timbre of whatever stuff is playing. Like, its mind-blowing to me and I have nothing i can analogize it to. Its incredible we can even take pictures with pixels, sound is just a whole notha level that astounds me
Everything about the exact timbre of your voice is captured in the waveform that represents it. To the extent that the sampling rate and bit depth are good enough to mimic your actual voice without introducing digital artefacts (something analogous to a pixelated image) that's all it takes to reproduce any sound with arbitrary precision.
Timbre is the result of having a specific set of frequencies playing simultaneously, that is characteristic of the specific shape and material properties of the object vibrating (be it a guitar string, drum skin, or vocal chords).
As for how multiple frequencies can "exist" simultaneously at a single instant in time, you might want to read up on Fourier's theorem and watch 3Blue1Brown's brilliant series on differential equations that explores Fourier series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY