Interpolate

The word has two major meanings that both apply to music technology: 1) To estimate the value of something, and 2) to alter or falsify. Interpolation is used in digital audio (and other digital systems) to work around brief periods of incomplete data acquisition. In a digital audio stream, if a few words of data are lost quite often error correction can calculate and simulate what ‘probably’ happened in that space and fill the gap without the listener noticing. This has been an important part of digital audio from the beginning because due to its real time nature there often isn’t time to go back and try to re-read missing data.