Friday, April 1, 2011

Vol. I No. 3

I was never a fan of Jimi Hendrix's music. As I remember it, it sounded like a sort of Wall of Noise, a cacophony, full of distortion, lacking the fluid rhythmic continuity that I enjoyed in other music.

Recently I heard about a minute of one of his most familiar songs as a lead-in to a segment of Coast to Coast AM. Digital sampling does a very conspicuously bad job of reproducing Hendrix. In all-analog playback, his vocal part is prominent and clearly recognizable. In the digitalized version, you can barely hear it at all.

To those who would argue that digital audio sounds good, sounds better, the case of Jimi Hendrix may very well support that claim. In all-analog form, his music is almost un-listenable. In digitalized form, you hear a sterilized, castrated, innocuous version which would go off much better as elevator music.

What I have noticed about digital audio is that it never reproduces harmony of two or more instruments nor even the fullness of tone of a single instrument or voice. Instead, it tends to produce a thin-toned simulation of whichever instrument or voice is most prominent in the music signal. When you hear apparent harmony in digital playback, you are actually hearing the rapid alternation of the sample from one of the instruments to another.

The nature of the movement of energy in music is that it flows and accumulates; it rises and falls like a loop on a roller coaster; it declines to an almost-nothingness and builds to extremes that constantly overwhelm the capabilities of a reproduction technology.

It is in fact only because the traditional analog reproduction technology is so limited that digital processing of audio is able to be convincingly equivalent.

This is why I am seeking to develop a sound-on-film technology (using the 'variable intensity' process) incorporating a design which, like Edison's invention, uses the same transducer for both record and playback.

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