In the digital age, listening to music has become ubiquitous thanks to smartphones and streaming services. While analog music media degrade due to wear and tear, digital music can be preserved indefinitely without deformation. With the advancement of digital technology, music recommendation systems offer a personalized experience.
Today, listening to music stored on our smartphones is something we’re used to. A decade or so ago, cassette tapes and cassette players were commonplace, but some young students today have never seen a record or cassette tape. We often refer to the modern era as the digital age, but the opposite is analog. The term analog or digital refers to how information is processed and stored. Music, one of the oldest forms of human culture, has also changed dramatically in the digital age.
Music, or more essentially sound, is represented by waves. A wave is an oscillation of energy, a vibration, and the magnitude of the oscillation is called the amplitude. If we plot the amplitude as a function of time as a connected line, we get the familiar time-amplitude curve. This is called a waveform. Knowing the waveform of a sound means that we can reproduce it. Sound media are a means of storing this time-amplitude curve.
Analog sound media, such as records and cassette tapes, record waveforms exactly as they are. In other words, the actual waveform is imprinted on the plate or film. When you play it back, it is read out, amplified, and played back.
Digital media, on the other hand, slices the waveform into chunks of time and stores the amplitude at each time as a number. This process is called analog-to-digital conversion. How finely the time is sliced during this conversion is known as the sampling rate, and how much detail is included in the numbering is known as the bit-depth, which determines the quality of the sound source. For example, a music CD’s specification of 44.1 kHz, 16-bit means that one second is divided into 44,100 parts and stored in as much detail as there are 16 powers of two. When you want to play it back, you have to convert these numbers back into analog form, or sound.
Another big advantage of digital music is convenience and accessibility. We can now easily find and listen to the music we want, whenever and wherever we want, through our smartphones or computers. Internet streaming services offer vast libraries of music, and users can discover and enjoy new music with just a few clicks. This shows how revolutionized the way we consume music has become compared to the past. You no longer have to buy or store physical media, and you have access to a wide variety of music without the limitations of space.
Have you ever had the experience of listening to your favorite cassette tape over and over again, only to have it start to deteriorate? Analog media wear and tear with use, making it sound different from the original recording. It’s like a pencil dulling. The point gets dulled and blunted more easily, so the high frequencies are relatively weaker and eventually turn into a muffled sound, which we often perceive as ‘old’. Analog media cannot stand the test of time. On the other hand, digital music media stores information as numbers, so it doesn’t deteriorate or change its content even if it is used many times. As long as there are no problems, it can be stored forever. In addition, digital storage devices are small and easy to handle compared to their storage capacity, so analog music media are becoming rare except in special cases.
It’s interesting to note that digital music sources are becoming increasingly high specification these days, and it’s ironic that the goal is to get closer to the original, i.e. analog, sound. Technologies like Hi-Res Audio showcase the effort to reproduce the finer details of sound quality. It’s essentially an attempt by digital technology to mimic the warm, natural sound of analog.
Additionally, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of music recommendation systems that can automatically recommend music that matches your tastes. This allows for the personalization of music consumption, making each individual’s musical experience richer and more varied. For example, services like Spotify and Apple Music analyze your listening history to provide personalized playlists. This increases the opportunities for users to discover and enjoy new music.
We can look forward to the development of digital music sources that will one day fulfill the twin tasks of perfect reproduction and eternal preservation. The evolution of digital music is never-ending, and new possibilities will continue to open up as technology advances. In the digital age, music is no longer just entertainment, but an important part of our lives.
