[MayeulC]

In truth, it's because text is quite easy to handle. It's easy to make a program that handles text, too.

And so we have a lot of text editors, diff tools, efficient compression, tools like sort and uniq: the whole unix ecosystem.

So if you transform sound to text, you can then use text tools to compare the output to catch differences. A simple serialization of numerical sample values would have caught the bug, but I agree that having a way of visualizing the output is nice.

Command line input, programming, etc. is also still mostly done with text, because it's easy to transform. Of course, you can imagine working at a higher level with objects (like powershell does IIRC), mimetypes, etc.