The desired effect for immersive quality in the Ambience of the performance will be greatly ehanced through the use of properly cued, realistic sounds.
A common method of obtaining realistic sounds is to record or sample a real sound for later playback on demand under computer control. The rate at which sound is sampled is very important, and depending upon the application, very low rates can be acceptable; though an audiophile would like a frequency range of at least 20KHz, most human speech is below 4KHz, and intelligible speech can be distinguished from a bandwidth as low as 2.2KHz (300Hz to 2500Hz). The sample rate should be at least twice that of the highest frequency of the sound sampled; this is known as the Nyquist rate. Sampling below the Nyquist rate results in under sampling which produces lower frequency aliasing which interferes with the desired sound on playback. To support the full 20KHz human audio spectrum, sound samplers will use at least a 40KHz sampling frequency; most adults can not hear frequencies this high. As mentioned earlier, speech is predominantly below 4KHz, and though sampling at 40KHz may produce a higher quality sample, a 5KHz sampling rate is sufficient for intelligible speech and only takes 1/8th of the storage space that a 40KHz sample would require.