Dithering is a technique used in digital imaging to create the illusion of color depth and smooth gradients. It involves adding noise or random patterns to an image, which helps to reduce the appearance of banding in areas with subtle color transitions. This is particularly useful in situations where a limited color palette is available, such as in computer graphics or printing. In audio processing, dithering serves a similar purpose by minimizing distortion when reducing the bit depth of sound files. By introducing low-level noise, it helps to mask quantization errors that occur during this process. This technique is commonly used in music production and digital audio editing.