Aliasing in Audio, Easily Explained: From Wagon Wheels to Waveforms

Aliasing is a fundamental distortion in digital audio where high-frequency sounds are incorrectly recorded as lower frequencies, much like how a fast-spinning wheel appears to move backward in a movie. This phenomenon occurs when the audio sampling rate is too low to accurately capture the rapid oscillations of a sound wave. Instead of preserving the original sound, the system creates entirely new, fake tones that can turn crisp highs into muddy, unnatural rumbles. To prevent this irreversible corruption, the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem dictates that the sampling rate must be greater than twice the highest frequency present in the signal.