From this point of view, the A-law and μ-law algorithms (G.711) used in traditional PCM digital telephony can be seen as an earlier precursor of speech encoding, requiring only 8 bits per sample but giving effectively 12 bits of resolution.[6] The logarithmic companding laws are consistent with human hearing perception in that a low-amplitude noise is heard along a low-amplitude speech signal but is masked by a high-amplitude one. Although this would generate unacceptable distortion in a music signal, the peaky nature of speech waveforms, combined with the simple frequency structure of speech as a periodic waveform having a single fundamental frequency with occasional added noise bursts, make these very simple instantaneous compression algorithms acceptable for speech.