QUESTION 3:
Do you imagine that the computers of the 1960's were built to handle audio data?
Without knowing more about how the pattern is being used, it is impossible to say.
You might have been tempted to say that the pattern 0000000000000000 represents "zero." But it doesn't necessarily. Even such an obvious pattern has no automatic meaning.
If you were told that the above pattern were of type "short," then you would be correct: as a short, it represents the integer zero. Here is another pattern:
1111111110011001
As a short, this pattern represents -103 (negative one hundred three.)
There are uncountably many types of data that can be represented in the memory of a computer. If specific patterns always had specific meanings, only a few types of data could be represented. This would be much too restrictive. Many of the types of data are invented by programmers as they write programs.
Not all machines use memory this way. A simple electronic calculator, for example, uses memory for one purpose only: to store floating point numbers. It uses only one data type, and can do only those things that it has been wired to do. The engineers who designed the calculator decided how to represent numbers with bit strings, and then designed the electronics to work with just those strings. This is too restrictive for a general purpose computer.
Do you imagine that the computers of the 1960's were built to handle audio data?