Differences between Analog/Digital Music. Review on Little Known but Interesting Facts About Music

In my earlier review, I threw some light about music and it’s experience, the feelings that it makes the listener go through. Today, I want to stress about the differences in natural(Analog) music and it’s digital counterpart.  Natural instruments have always found a place in every listener’s heart, but the listener of today may not realize the difference. So that’s where this piece of advice fits in.

Before the advent of digital music, people created music the old fashioned way. If they wanted a string ensemble, they had to find such a huge group, different violinists, flutists, etc to create an orchestra, and they had to record this with such a huge group, split into different sections. So, in reality the production costs, time, labor all was very high, and the margin for error was very less.

But, as recent advancements in the field of electronics and semiconductors came to be, companies started to churn out digital keyboards, popular brands are Yamaha, Casio, Roland. These instruments had all tones and they played out with good clarity. So suddenly, people had a vast amount of tones at their disposal, when they wanted to play a song. At the same time, the computer revolution was also I the boom, so when sound cards were being introduced for the PC, there was a big issue of playing sound; how the PC treated sound files. This is where the standards came into play, and one standard that changed the way the PC handled music was the MIDI format. I know there are reviews written on MIDI.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This is only a protocol. This format doesn’t contain any audio at all. But it contains information and commands for a keyboard to create or make that sound. An association called the MMA(Midi Musician’s Association) is responsible for controlling this standard. This is now called the GM standard. Since the concept of storing commands to create music could drastically reduce file sizes, it was universally accepted that this standard would be enforced on all sound cards manufactured from that point on. That is why today, if you buy any cheap sound card you see a marking that the card is GM standard compliant.  The GM standard is a set of 127 instruments that is loaded on a chip in your sound card. So this 127 set of instruments is found virtually in every sound card ever since the MMA started enforcing it.  This virtually marked the creation of digital music, simply because you have a tone generator sitting in your sound card. Now all people had to do was to create software to access/manipulate that set of 127 tones. Get the picture?

The key difference to digital music, is the clarity of the sound. Since the sound is stored as a series of 0 and 1, it’s either ON or OFF. There’s no in between, so obviously the end clarity will be sharp, unlike an analog sound. Digital music is created(for example a keyboard), by recording the sample(the source of the sound), into an audio editing software. Then the sample is cleaned, and made perfect, with all the frequencies correct, adjusted for DC offset, normalized and evenly split. Then this sample is recorded again at a different pitch 3 or 4 times. All this is then stored on a chip. This is only for one instrument, so this process is then repeated for different instruments.

Now although, the clarity is so sharp, mostly the songs of today can’t be listened to repeatedly, unlike the songs of yester years. Why?.it’s because of something called the tonal range of the instruments. See, digital music is created and crafted at a studio. So it has a start point and an end point, on the other hand analog music has no limits at all. All the sounds, vibrations are naturally made, there is no digital recreation anywhere…so the sound is more natural and it immediately clicks. That’s why they say that golden hits will never die.

Actually speaking. Now there’s a move to go back to analog, for it’s warmth and roundedness. This roundedness cannot be achieved with digital sampling, as digital sampling is too perfect. But people choose digital over analog because of work pressures, self control, one man ship etc. Imagine of you had to conduct an orchestra, and one member is absent. True, you can have the recording without him, but you’ll have to wait for him to come or re-record with someone else. You’ll have to wait on the other people for them to come to you. All this increases the time for which you’ll have to spend money. Now since there’s so much digital music around, people don’t wait for all this. They usually have a  MIDI setup or  a soft synth setup at home in a proper studio and then do the entire mix right there.

But still the final question is.is analog or digital better?…this is a per user choice. If you’d ask me I’d say analog is better because it captures the sound like no other, although it may lack certain features of digital sampling, but it’s pure music to the ears.

Digital on the other hand is good for genres like Disco, Techno, Rave etc., because all these are electronically created. So it’s better to stay that way. More reviews coming on.