[GHERDEZ]

Originally Posted by Hirs Ute

Thanks Solaris, very interesting and thanks for sharing. Actually two stories here, one being the ability to compress a file into something quite tiny and the other being able to reproduce, on a computer, the nuances of a clarinet and a clarinet player that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Hello Hirs Ute,

After reading Solaris’ article and going through peoples’ responses, I noticed that in your post, you contemplate another story within the story. And I would like to suggest the reason why the “other story” had to be imbedded into the apparently innocuous, main title, announcing the digital reproduction of a clarinet in a very tiny file. The underlying reason is to tone down FEAR. This may sound strange, but I’ll try to explain. There has been, for some time now, an uncomfortable feeling among musicians in academia who feel that computers will, at some point, replace them. This comment may not cause dent in nowadays conviction that computers and technology are only there to aid the artist to develop an idea. But, this wasn’t the case around 20 years ago, even when there were notable successful examples in the music industry, such as Front 242, used MIDI and computer technology to create music. While much of the “old” phobia was discarded, after the technology limitations were exposed, and assured composers and musicians alike, that they still had an artistic edge. However, much of the language of music technology research has been tuned to avoid proven pitfalls, that earlier, inspired rejection by musicians in academia and the professional field. Twenty years ago, you would read articles of people who reproduced an orchestra with a computer controlling several synthesizers through MIDI, boasting that sounded no different to a real performance. Many people bought equipment, followed the diagrams that showed them how to get all connected, and started experimenting and creating. But not everyone embraced change, music academics, and some professionals viewed this new technology as a threat to all the years that they invested in mastering one or more instruments.

MIDI files, as Gluteus Maximus, noted are very small since there are only a list of values that, when played, access a library of digitalized sounds. And 20 years ago, this worked out fine, because memory storage was considerably more expensive. The article mentions that "Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music." However, the “linear recording” method used to record sound on CDs has been known to be a waste of space. The argument became widely known in early 90’s digital format battles, like the one that PHILLIPS dcc (digital compact cassette) vs. SONY cd. PHILLIPS argued that CD’s linear encoding resulted in 75% of the file consisting of frequencies strange to the human ear, and through its ”perceptional recording” method would use only 25% of the space required of that of a CD (with the frequencies that we could hear). But, memory storage in CDs had come down in price, and there was no incentive to save space anymore. And, as time progresses, there is less and less incentive to save on memory storage. People will point out that purpose to encode music in mp3s is to save space, but, this is only because the desire to store more albums has outgrown the storage capacity in some memory storage devices. I am sure that there are incentives however, to make music digital files smaller, like for gaming applications where you need to save CPU power in order to keep up a good performance while the game is running. This is the case for OGG Codec files which are, up to 10 times, smaller than mp3s. But, for the sake of just recording to music, what would be the significance to the music listener the existence of a Micro-mp3?

The real issue I suspect is "Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them," that is revealed at the end of the article. Naming the article after this statement would have had to go into more detail on the methods of adding the nuances of a real-life performer in to a computer model, and the computer model itself (and, maybe, would have answered Gluteus Maximus’ question of how big are the files of the clarinet player?) Additionally, it would have brought a lot of skeptical responses from musicians with questions like: is technology going to replace me? And, technology does not remain static, so will performers be outperformed like in the case of Gary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue?

Best Regards….

GHERDEZ