a vision of digital audio
It strikes me as a strange paradox that the more accustomed we become to technology in lives and in our creative processes - technology that we have grow very accostomed to seeing evolve and make possisble that which was only previously impossible; as Scott McNealy said '?Technology has the shelf life of a banana.? - its strange that it's often so difficult to envison the tehcnological future. Picturing the next 5 years is easy. 10 not so hard. But 300 years from now...?
I often find myself refelctng on this passage below from the New Atlantis buy Sir Francis Bacon in which, in the most extordinary detail and confidence, he describes the type of digitla audio technology that we work with everyday....
"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demon- strate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their orig- inal are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, re- flecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."- Francis Bacon 1624
I still remember my first twidling of the dials of a synthesiser and
then later the wiggling the virtual controls of a soft-syth with a mouse. Banging the button-pads
of a digital sampler like a new age bongo drum and uploading my first mp3 to the internet. More than anything I remember Acid - not the small hallucination inducing tabs of paper under the tounge - but rather the software from fledgling company Sonic Foundry: I remember the awe of dragging the tempo slider, hearing all the instruments change tempo in time whilst the pitch stayed the same. Independant pitch and tempo control... We do that now and we think nothign of it. To do it then seamed like a miracle.
As Arthur C Clarke once said
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Posted at 01:00AM Apr 23, 2007
by Mike Jones in audio |
