Pause, We Can Go Back
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I had a collection of vinyl records & cassettes growing up but I've gotten more enjoyment and revelations from listening to Foobar software accessing thousands of flac/mp3 files instantly on demand. I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media. Digital has allowed me to appreciate music even more.
The vast majority of articles of analog-vs-digital seem to favor analog and it downplays how digital can engage people in ways that analog can't replicate.
As an example, the first time I heard the Star Wars soundtrack was on a reel-to-reel tape machine.[1] Analog nostalgia. However, with digital technology, a skilled person with a computer workstation can use virtual instruments to recreate the orchestral arrangement one instrument at a time.[2] The listener can then hear the gradual build up of how all the various parts interact and appreciate the music even more than the old analog tape. That demonstration is not economically possible with analog. Sure, one could make a 24-track analog tape of isolated parts but typical listeners will not have the money to own a 24-track player at home. Also, David Das in the video is experimenting with various combinations of articulations, tempo, and volume and that combinatorial explosion exceeds the capacity of 24 tracks.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+soundtrack+reel+re...
[2] deep link showing adding an instrument and then a playback payoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfbm3qHRLI&feature=youtu.be...
Has it? You're jumping from one thing to another rather than just playing one thing, sitting back, and enjoying.
Put a different way, a real-life radio station has to constrain itself to one genre. Because of the economics of advertisers/demographics, a media conglomerate can't create a radio station that plays pop+classical+jazz. However, with digital (Spotify or desktop Foobar), I can create my own "multi-genre radio station" for my listening pleasure.
I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy. Whenever something new overtakes something old, that's going to happen. I'm excited about self-driving cars relieving me from having to drive while other people are still buying manual transmission cars because they love the direct manipulation of the machine. When I want a cup of tea, I dump hot water over a tea bag while other people go through an elaborate ritual.
I don't have a record player, but I do have fond memories of sitting in my room with headphones on while a record played, looking at the large format cover art and studying the sleeve. I'm not a collector of anything, but I think I understand the joy of artifacts.
One thing I am somewhat surprised is that the streaming music services haven't borrowed the idea of filters from Instagram to apply to music. Would anybody be interested in simulating playback through a tube amp? Through a suitcase record player? Through a high quality turntable? Or a low quality turntable that can't quite turn at 33-1/3 RPMs?
Also, there is something to delaying gratification that can enhance the experience, and adding a certain kind of ceremony around the act will help too. In "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", it isn't just about the sushi. It's about the experience of knowing that you're being served by a craftsman who dedicated his life to perfecting his craft and being served in the way that he deems enhances the flavor. Rationally, it's silly, but we're emotional beings most of the time. Trump won largely because of emotion - it wasn't really a rational decision that the electorate took.
No, I'm not ignoring that aspect and I understand that physical touch of media can add enjoyment for some people.
What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes. That perspective presents a one-sided view favoring analog such as:
1) physical media you can touch is better than digital bits you can't touch
2) ownership is better than subscription (Spotify streaming)
3) listening in 20-minute side of 1 album is better than instantly jumping around a large music library
... ergo, analog is overall better than digital consumption. (As I stated before, I disagree as a person who straddles both the vinyl and digital eras. I've had extensive experience with both formats and the digital experience is better in my case. Many people besides me have come to this same conclusion.)
Yes, holding in your hand a vinyl album's cover art and reading its lyrics can add joy to music but there's also the opposite view that seems uncool to write about: there's also joy in not handling physical media. It's this second perspective I'm emphasizing and it doesn't take away from anyone who prefers their vinyl records.
Digital is better if your priority is the things that are more easy with digital. If you ask me to mix your movie soundtrack, I'll head straight for the digital desk hooked up to the Pro Tools rig and it's be plugins for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you invite me to jam for musical pleasure, I'll switch on the 303 that I have wired into a shitty desk that I bought because it sounds so shitty and I enjoy the way it crunches a hot signal.
Multitracking, refining, polishing, can be enjoyable and deliver a sense of accomplishment when you deliver the end product, but it's work. The music I make and listen to for pleasure is typically done with cheaper, crappier gear, pushed beyond its design parameters, and recorded in one pass. I suppose you could cal it a techno-punk aesthetic; when you have sequencers and editing tools at your fingertips, the personal aspects are best expressed (for me) through performance rather than through perfection.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but it's a general problem in our technology culture. To me this is not that different from not wanting to write code all the time. You know what I hate about writing code? When I'm working with unfamiliar languages/frameworks/libraries I don't know what all the available options are, whereas when I'm working with more visual tools I can see all the options even if I don't understand what they do, and I can select and experiment and, well, play with the options until I find something useful or interesting. I can't play when I'm writing code because my experiments are just liable to result in syntax errors or suchlike.
Writing code appeals to people who like learning a bunch of things first and then recombining them. I find this kind of learning slow and tedious and I keep wonder why I'm doing all this syntax bullshit instead of letting the computer handle it for me so I can focus on my domain-specific ideas.
Likewise when I talk with DSP programmers about how I like the unpredictability and nonlinearities of analog signals, they say things like 'I could add a random noise generator to the oscillator algorithm' or so (I'm simplifying, but that's a design reality on many electronic musical instruments). This is often a self-defeatinmg strategy, at least in the short term - witness Roland corporation bending over backwards to do The! Most! Accurate! Component! simulation! Ever! in a recent line of digital devices featuring 'analog circuit behavior'. Meanwhile their smaller rival Korg has completely crushed them in the very important entry and mid-level market segments by simply producing what the market wanted - a wide variety of cheap analog gear, mixing both classic and new designs, and labeling the boards and publishing the schematics so people can mod them if they're handy with a soldering iron.
Do you want writers to start every sentence with "in my opinion" or "I think" or "it's my belief that"? From the context you can usually figure when a writer is expressing an opinion vs stating an objective fact.
As for virtual instruments, those are like video game emulators: they give future generations some semblance of what the original was like, but it's just not the same as actual hardware.
Digital sampling can capture 20 kilohertz just fine. An analog recording pathway isn't really going to capture much more information than a digital one.
Analog mastering doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range of digital; a CD with its paltry 16 bit has a noise floor below -90dB. There are staggeringly few analog mastering setups that can do that. Move to 20+ bits (i.e. all pro digital mastering setups) and you are getting to the point where an analog setup might be able to maintain the SNR, but would be astronomically expensive.
As far as the harmonics, there is little evidence that humans can detect 22kHz+ sound at safe listening levels, and once you talk about 96 samples/s most speakers can't reproduce anything like the original signal at 40kHz+. It might make a physical difference if you have a $20k electrostatic setup, but you won't be able to hear it.
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h...
This tends to be true in practice due to "loudness war" problems - many CDs are mastered not for accuracy but for popularity.
Where analog generally falls down on the job is, you typically need actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual studio to lay down a track. None of this wave-table-synth, virtual instrument shit. And no Auto-Tune or other automatic correction either; if a musician flubs a track, generally they have to rerecord it. Pop producers consider this a bug; serious musicians consider it a feature.
This, btw. is why nobody masters at 16 bits; the insufficient headroom. 16 bits is plenty for playback though.
[edit]
I do want to acknowledge the big weakness of a digital setup that you touch on here, which is the hard clipping. If you ever clip in digital, you have ruined the recording while many analog setups will have a soft rolloff (Tube amps v. BJT amps are similar; the soft clipping of a tube amp is much less unpleasant than the hard clipping of a BJT amp. You can "get away" with a lower wattage tube amp for this reason; a properly sized BJT amp is more accurate though). All this is moot for professional recordings though as a sound engineer who regularly clips by accident (rather than to intentionally get a particular sound) will get fired.
Obviously you've never mastered a Disaster Area album. :)
Perhaps a grainy photograph vs. the lidar is a more apt comparison. The former has character, but the latter is a much better approximation of the real thing. Also you can generate a grainy photograph from your accurate digital measurements if you so choose.
Maybe a better metaphor would be a laser pointed vs a flashlight - assuming they emit the name # of lumens, which one is more useful for exploring a dark room? This is why I think the pursuit of endless precision in calculating the value of irrational/transcendental numbers is an amusing hobby but ultimately a waste of time.
The other side is that sites like Soundcloud are a godsend for bedroom producers. I've found an incredible diversity of sounds from there also
This is what musicians like. It's the individuality and texture of things that appeal to artists as much as the overarching form; that's why people still put paint on canvas with brushes or other tools despite the vast possibilities offered by graphics software.
Even if I agreed with that notion, it still isn't an argument against digital distribution per se. Digitally, we can add (in software) distortion that is similar to that you'd encounter with vinyl. I have some digitally produced tracks that are done this way, actually: even end-to-end digital, the tracks sound as though they are coming off a vinyl record. The aesthetic is maintained and played back exactly as the artist intended.
Some folks even introduce distortion after the conversion back to analog, e.g. with "warm sounding" tube amps.
Is the author suggesting that great art and writing can no longer happen, because of Snapchat and Yelp? Because I'd argue that we've never lived in a time when it's been easier to create art, of all kinds, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of great literature being published, either.
I find this endless bemoaning of the unrealness of "digital" quite tiresome.
This all seems more like an excuse. "I could be Hemingway if only that dastardly Yelp weren't distracting me all the time!". Yelp isn't the one to blame here.
See, you've put all of your spiritual and ethical eggs in to your technologic worship so you are completely closed off to the notion that smartphones might actually be really horrible. You're basically just defending your own thinly veiled insecurities about how you give your own life meaning.
I'm an old fogey who isn't young or cool enough to have all my eggs in that basket. My eggs are far more in the sitting-around-reading-books-and-newspapers and hiking-in-the-mountains baskets.
But I do think this hysteria is pretty overblown, as your comment demonstrates.
Less snidely, ignoring the context in which actions take place is not reasonable. We are immensely shaped by the environment that we are a part of.
The trickier question of how to balance such realizations with the concept of individual responsibility? It seems the jury is still out on that one. My guess is that the most productive efforts will be those that produce better outcomes from a systemic perspective, through more harmonious alignment of underlying incentives and a developing understanding of human nature.
This article is about the increasing rejection of the flood of digital information.
You're clearly still addicted to your devices.
An increasing number of us are playing acoustic guitars, going camping, playing board games, listening to vinylr records and mainly enjoying each other's company without any intermediary consumer device.
This forum is filled with technocratic mutants who cling to some half-baked theology that the digital revolution will save our souls, so I'm not expecting to change any minds. Hell, this forum is basically designed to halt any notion of discourse and to amplify the pro-tech rhetoric.
Best of luck!
And art that is created without effort tends to deliver only superficial pleasure and is accordingly treated as a disposable commodity rather than the product of a singular vision allied with patient craft.
You might enjoy reading Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. While this was written in the 1930 it remains very readable and its observations are easily synthesized with the distinguishing features of digital technology.
Nobody knows what you're doing on your iPad. You could be reading your e-mails, scrolling through twitter, or buying something on Amazon. But in a more casual environment (living room, with friends), you lose opportunities for spontaneous interactions.
There's also a difficulty in sharing. You can't give the funny pages to someone. Hard to loan e-books sometimes.
I think some of this is solved by TV screens. Long term, I bet we'll be "casting" our phones to screens a lot more often in social environments.
But sometimes the limitation of physical goods is nice. Legos are funner than CAD software, most of the time.
Take a screenshot, paste it into your WhatsApp chat group. Now you've shared it with your friends all around the world, for them to read at their pleasure.
I agree with you on the ebooks, though.
Tech is social in its own way but it seems to be bringing these massive anthropological changes. It will be interesting to see whether the come back of physical tech like vinyl is serious or it's just some of kind of a protest of the older generation.
Nobody prints giant newspaper headlines anymore. Nobody holds a map upside-down.
My bet is many more movies will be based in the 80s.
There's no universe where having less information available to students improves learning.
Wikipedia for everyone is revolutionary! I doubt an OECD test can capture that.
The problem OLPC faced is that the iPod touch was a more compelling device for children. Its bill of materials today is less than $100. And children use touch devices religiously. OLPC had no hope of delivering a competitor to iPhone on technological and business grounds. But the theory is probably sound.
I think that's an oversimplification.
I highly recommend The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. A quicker read is the article that inspired the book: Is Google Making Us Stupid?[0]
He's not blindly or rapidly anti-tech. For example, he says: "The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes."
But he does recognize that there are drawbacks to how we engage with digital media: "When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...
I think a holiday island that banned all mobile broadband could actually use it as a selling point.
Sounds real rough ;)
I got quite a bit of exploratory programming done, and read a lot of books (and explored Cuba itself of course! Made half a dozen friends, amazingly friendly people)
Unfortunately I think before I get a change to go the island will be blanketed in 4G (fortunately for them though... I think).
Sort of. One of the most important features of board games is that they're comfortable to play while drinking. Sax's example of Snakes and Lattes, after all, is actually a bar.
The digital gives us an alternative to typical entertainment, food, drugs and alcohol.
On the other hand, one big "need" is simply for the familiar, and another is to be different from the crowd. Old timers will hold onto their vinyl because it brings back memories that cannot be replaced, while young hipsters will buy them because no one else their age is. Simply being modern prevents new audio technology from fulfilling either need.