100 Days Of ML Code — Day 089

Recap From Day 088

Day 088, we looked at the part two of analog versus digital sound.

You can catch up using the link below. 100 Days Of ML Code — Day 088 Recap From Day 087medium.com

Today we will continue from where we left off in day 088

Copying Analog And Digital

I said I wanted to take a quick digression. It’s not really a digression because it’s really elemental to the differences between analog and digital media and it has to do with how we copy media.

When you make a copy of a record. Say if you’re dubbing a record to a cassette tape or something like I did as a kid, it’s not a perfect copy that you end up with because you’re copying analog data. You’re copying this continuous function. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s going through and it’s essentially rerecording this data as it’s being played back.

In the digital domain you’re just copying a bunch of zeros and ones and if you’re worried you might make a mistake you can go back and check again and again to make sure that you haven’t made a mistake you know in all kinds of different ways.

Digital copies are perfect replicas of the originals. There isn’t really no sense of a master anymore because every copy can be perfect and this obviously had lots of implications on music sharing and and piracy and legal ramifications.

Once you can just rip a CD or share a file online all of a sudden and it’s perfect as opposed to the generational effects of making copies of copies of copies of analog media it can become much more of an issue.

What I wanted to really talk about here is the implications of analog versus digital in a more artistic sense and to demonstrate this, I want to talk to you about a work by filmmaker Bill Morrison and a composer Michael Gordon it’s called Light is Calling.

Source

It was written in 2004 and what Bill Morrison did here was he he took some film footage from some early silent films that was in archives and these film reels were starting to decay.

If you put these into a projector they might just disintegrate or they might be able to play once or twice before they start falling apart but the images were not as they looked originally in the 20’s or the 30’s or whenever they were originally made.

They’re really transformed and dirty, and there’s all kinds of noise, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell what the original was, sometimes you can make out little bits of it and so he edited a bunch of stuff together from a silent film called The Bells for this piece, and then Michael Gordon actually using digital sound composed a soundtrack to go along with it.

what I think it really shows is how analog and digital media can decay in different ways because here’s this ancient kind of crumbling analog film reel and it still contains some of the original information in it. Digital data doesn’t degrade nearly as gracefully.

That’s all for day 089. I hope you found this informative. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule and allowing me to be your guide on this journey. And until next time, be legendary.