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Digital & Analogue Recording

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A small essay on digital & analogue recording, as well as what really matters with sound & frequency processing.



Sound is an impulse. An impulse of energy - in this case, the energy is moving air or some other resonant material. Vitality, energy, harmony - all that in the West is treated separately, in Chinese is called "ji" - the life essence itself. Music is a direct incarnation, reflexion of that.

The charge, potential, power of sound impulse is usually notated in frequency terms by humans.

Digital processing involves the conversion of any analogue of an image (or sound) into bit-coded representation. Initially there are only two solid states of a bit - on or off (true/false, yes/no, 1/0, etc.). With more bits assigned, the complexity can be increased, e. g. with several bits representing the position of a character in a mapped alphabet, other bits representing the position of a character within a line, other bits drawing the character onscreen, etc.

In digital representation, a whole of a picture or a fragment of sound is represented in smallest possible fragments - quantums. In the case of imagery, the smallest component of a represented picture is pixel. In the case of sound, it is sample. A pixel is a smallest square dot represented by a bitmapped image; a sample is a fragment of a second, capturing variation from one state of a sound wave to another. The more samples per second, the higher the frequency of sound wave captured, the higher the resolution (and precision) of the digital soundwave, the more natural the sounding.

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December 2009
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