I was wondering, how does a .wav file get chopped up and made into sound? When I open a .wav in a dos text editor, it is a bunch of ASCII characters in certain patterns.

To make sound, you need a frequency and a volume level, right? So what in that .wav file is the frequency and what is the volume level?

Has anyone seen websites that would explain the inner working of file types like this one or others such as .mp3, .avi's even? If I figured this out I thought I could maybe compile a working .wav file from inside my program with different frequency and volume controls. Possible?