The pitch of the sound produced by the waveform depends upon its frequency. To tell the system what frequency to use, you need to specify the sampling period. The sampling period specifies the number of system clock ticks , or timing intervals, that should elapse between each sample (byte of audio data) fed to the digital-to-analog converter in the audio channel. There is a period register for each audio channel. The value of the period register is used for count-down purposes; each time the register counts down to 0, another sample is retrieved from the waveform data set for output. In units, the period value represents clock ticks per sample. The minimum period value you should use is 124 ticks per sample NTSC (123 PAL) and the maximum is 65535. These limits apply to both PAL and NTSC machines. For high-quality sound, there are other constraints on the sampling period (see the section called Producing High-quality Sound ). The period is inversely proportional to the frequency. ------------------------------------------------------ A low period value corresponds to a higher frequency sound and a high period value corresponds to a lower frequency sound. Limitations on Selection of Sampling Period Specifying the Period Value