ABSTRACT
Modern information theory also teaches us that the essence of information is the pattern or organization of the signal elements, regardless of the substantive nature of these signals - electromagnetic vibrations, air vibrations, spatial or temporal arrangements of objects or events, and the like. This means that signals may go through many transformations and appear in various substantive forms, but as long as the organization of the various elements remains invariant over the transformation, the potential information provided by the signals is preserved and requires only the final mapping into the receiving reference set to deliver its message. As a familiar example, we might take radio and television broadcasting and receiving, or the reproduction of events via disc recordings or audio and video magnetic tape. Thus, sound signals from air vibrations are transduced by the microphone, which transforms the pattern of air vibration into a nearly isomorphic pattern of mechanical vibrations of a diaphragm; this in turn transforms the pattern into electrical signals, which, after several more transformations, may preserve the pattern as wiggles in a record groove or magnetized bits along a tape. Eventually, if the fidelity is adequate, the pattern may be
transduced by a loudspeaker into air vibrations recognized as the vocal or musical message that originally entered the microphone.
