Most simple sound format?

I was reading about bitmap images. They are one of the more simple image formats (especially 1 bit bitmaps). I am interested to see what a sound file looks like. May someone refer me to the most simple sound file format?

thanks

Actually, I found this wav file link. If someone else has any other links/words of wisdom they'd like to post I'd appreciate it.

From stackoverflow

• 8-bit mono uncompressed WAV, in my opinion...

  wikipedia entry

  Mark Heath : technically yes that is the "simplest", but its well worth going 16 bit if you want half-decent sound quality.

• Wave files are the simplest sound format. They have a header (which can sometimes be complicated but usually isn't), and then the actual sound data is raw, uncompressed PCM. Because they're uncompressed, though, they get very big very fast for even moderately long sounds.

• WAV is the way to go, although be wary - the WAV file format may actually store compressed data - though it usually doesn't.

  I'm using Audacity recently to import raw sound data from a microcontroller system. It can also export raw audio.

  That way you can start with sound in nearly any format, and export it as a binary file according to your desire. I'm using 16 bit signed, little endian, mono sound, for instance. Very handy and very easy to manipulate in simple test programs. Can probably even deserialize it in some programming languages into an array or vector.

• Look into libsndfile http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/