A signal as referred to in communication systems, signal processing, and electrical

engineering "is a function that conveys information about the behavior or attributes
of some phenomenon".[1] In the physical world, any quantity exhibiting variation in
time or variation in space (such as an image) is potentially a signal that might
provide information on the status of a physical system, or convey a message
between observers, among other possibilities.[2] The IEEE Transactions on Signal
Processing states that the term "signal" includes[3] audio, video, speech, image,
communication, geophysical, sonar, radar, medical and musical signals.

Other examples of signals are the output of a thermocouple, which conveys

temperature information, and the output of a pH meter which conveys acidity
information.[1] Typically, signals are often provided by a sensor, and often the
original form of a signal is converted to another form of energy using a transducer.
For example, a microphone converts an acoustic signal to a voltage waveform, and
a speaker does the reverse.[1]

The formal study of the information content of signals is the field of information
theory. The information in a signal is usually accompanied by noise. The term noise
usually means an undesirable random disturbance, but is often extended to include
unwanted signals conflicting with the desired signal (such as crosstalk). The
prevention of noise is covered in part under the heading of signal integrity. The
separation of desired signals from a background is the field of signal recovery,[4]
one branch of which is estimation theory, a probabilistic approach to suppressing
random disturbances.

Engineering disciplines such as electrical engineering have led the way in the
design, study, and implementation of systems involving transmission, storage, and
manipulation of information. In the latter half of the 20th century, electrical
engineering itself separated into several disciplines, specialising in the design and
analysis of systems that manipulate physical signals; electronic engineering and
computer engineering as examples; while design engineering developed to deal
with functional design of manmachine interfaces.

Definitions specific to subfields are common. For example, in information theory, a

signal is a codified message, that is, the sequence of states in a communication
channel that encodes a message.

In the context of signal processing, arbitrary binary data streams are not considered
as signals, but only analog and digital signals that are representations of analog
physical quantities.

In a communication system, a transmitter encodes a message into a signal, which is

carried to a receiver by the communications channel. For example, the words "Mary
had a little lamb" might be the message spoken into a telephone. The telephone
transmitter converts the sounds into an electrical voltage signal. The signal is
transmitted to the receiving telephone by wires; at the receiver it is reconverted
into sounds.

In telephone networks, signalling, for example common-channel signaling, refers to

phone number and other digital control information rather than the actual voice
signal.

Signals can be categorized in various ways. The most common distinction is

between discrete and continuous spaces that the functions are defined over, for
example discrete and continuous time domains. Discrete-time signals are often
referred to as time series in other fields. Continuous-time signals are often referred
to as continuous signals even when the signal functions are not continuous; an
example is a square-wave signal.

A second important distinction is between discrete-valued and continuous-valued.

Digital signals are sometimes defined as discrete-valued sequences of quantified
values, that may or may not be derived from an underlying continuous-valued
physical process. In other contexts, digital signals are defined as the continuoustime waveform signals in a digital system, representing a bit-stream. In the first
case, a signal that is generated by means of a digital modulation method is
considered as converted to an analog signal, while it is considered as a digital signal
in the second case.