The basic premise of the encoder is that most audio, and particularly speech, can be synthesized from only sinusoids and noise. The encoder describes individual sinusoids with amplitude and frequency, harmonic tones by fundamental frequency, amplitude and the spectral envelope of the partials, and the noise by amplitude and spectral envelope. This type of encoder is capable of encoding audio to between 6 and 16 kilobits per second for a typical audio bandwidth of 8 kHz.