Ryan Hartman 9/2911 Music 161 The Evolution of Digital Audio Advances in technology affect all aspects of our

everyday lives from how we get our news to how we perform tasks at work. Digital technology reaches across all ends of the spectrum including the music industry. For those of us in the music industry we have evolved from using a microphone and a cassette recorder to having studios running completely on computers with all storage and information digitized. This all occurred in a moderately short time as well. The real start for recording music, arguably was the invention of the player piano. To record notes for a player piano, one would play them on a piano that would make holes in a roll of paper, that when inserted into the player piano would trigger certain notes to be played. This was actually an archaic form of what we now call MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) today. However alongside this was Edisons phonograph which had a much broader use than the player piano which, as the name suggests, could only play music on the piano. The phonograph introduced the world to the idea of recording sound waves. There was a thin membrane in the phonograph the moved when hit by vibrations from sound, such as a voice, instrument etc. This would make a stylus scratch the sound wave into a wax Week 5

cylinder. These cylinders could then be put in other phonographs and a needle would trace the waves playing back the original sound. The phonograph was really the cornerstone behind most recording inventions to come. Eventually vinyl records came out as a more updated phonograph one might say, you could not record on it, but a needle traced the grooves on the large disc to play the sound that was recorded on them. Eventually magnetic tape was used in place of wax cylinders and vinyl disks. Sound waves could be magnetized on the tape and played back through cassette players. The sound was recorded on a microphone and utilized electricity as the means of imprinting the sound wave on the tape. This allowed Les Paul to introduce multi track recording where one could record two instrument parts separately and combine them on one tape to be played together. Up until this point all this recording had been analogue, it worked with having the raw, physical sound wave with a machine to play it back. During this time computers were starting to really flourish with their performance and usability. People began to try and record sound and store it on a computer. To do this the sound has to be stored in a way that computers can understand, which is binary code. Binary code is essentially a language of 1s and 0s which a computer can understand. As far as pertaining to recording sound, the computer needs to know two things about the sound to be able to store it and

play it back, the frequency or pitch, and the amplitude or volume. However there is a slight problem, because the computer works in 0s and 1s, they cannot just convey an exact wave. The amplitude and frequency constantly change, and to record those changes the computer looks at the wave in small increments known as samples (the average recording is sampled at roughly 441,000 samples per second ). So the computer analyzes the sound wave recorded by a microphone, at each spot analyzing the pitch and volume and compiling it all into a single file represented in binary code. The data also goes through quantization which is how it measures the volume which is done in bits per second (the average being either 16 or 24). This technology revolutionized the recording of sound worldwide, but there needed to be a way to distribute the recordings. Japan was the first to really cash in on digital recording. This all gave birth to the compact disc. These discs store these sound files by having tiny bumps in the surface. These bumps represent the 1s and 0s of the files binary code. Once the CD is placed in a player, a laser reads the code and plays back the sound as dictated by the binary. After the implementation of the CD, the focus began to shift into purely digital formats known as mp3s, aacs, etc. These formats have less quality but are extremely compressed and are easy to distribute, purchase, and store on iPods and other mp3 players. As for the future of the music business, I foresee major

technological advances in two areas. Computers are becoming more advanced every year, faster processing speeds, more memory, and other general improvements. With this in mind, audio recording could get to the point where we could almost map an entire sound wave. We could easily double sampling rates in roughly 20 years time. This would provide incredibly high quality sound and even more importantly would retain more quality when compressed. Compression algorithms will also improve so that less quality is lost. Finally as for playback, society seems to be moving toward devices that are universal such as the iPad. There will be new devices coming out that incorporate advanced audio features a long with other computer-like features that will be on an extremely small physical platform, which also seems to be the growing trend in hardware evolution. The music industry has evolved greatly since the first instance of audio recording in the phonograph. Comparing that to todays digital feats almost makes past processes seem archaic. As technology grows there will be more and more growth in the music industry as well. As time goes on developments seem to come faster than they did in the past. At this exponential growth rate, near anything could be possible.