In music, the sampling rate, sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per second (or per other unit) taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, the unit for sampling rate is 1/s. The inverse of the sampling frequency is the sampling period or sampling interval, which is the time between samples.
Analog Signal
Sampled Signal
In mathematics, a partition of an interval [a,b] is a finite sequence
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Each [xi,xi + 1] is called a subinterval of the partition. The mesh of a partition is defined to be the length of the longest subinterval [xi,xi + 1], that is, it is max(xi + 1 − xi) where
. It is also called the norm of the partition.
A tagged partition of an interval is a partition of an interval together with a finite sequence of numbers
subject to the conditions that for each i,
. In other words, it is a partition together with a distinguished point of every subinterval. The mesh of a tagged partition is the same as that of an ordinary partition.
Suppose that
together with
are a tagged partition of [a,b], and that
together with
are another tagged partition of [a,b]. We say that
and
together are a refinement of
together with
if for each integer i with
, there is an integer r(i) such that xi = yr(i) and such that ti = sj for some j with
. (It is not correct to allow j to equal r(i + 1) because sr(i + 1) is greater than or equal to xi + 1.) Said more simply, a refinement of a tagged partition takes the starting partition and adds more tags, but does not take any away.
We can define a partial order on the set of all tagged partitions by saying that one tagged partition is bigger than another if the bigger one is a refinement of the smaller one.

There is a pretty obvious similarity between those two notions : the refinement of a tagged partition represents an increase of the sampling rate.

