We’re going to be talking about the transition of music from analog to digital in class this week. It’s something that’s all around us and, thanks for the vinyl revival, an issue that remains in the forefront of discussions about music thirty years after the introduction of the first widely available digital media format, the compact disc.

This article was published last week in Pitchfork, and it raises some questions about how the analog and the digital (as experiences of the world and of music) intersect with each other. The author argues that rather than presuming that digital media will replace analog technologies, we will continue to navigate a dialectic between the two. Ultimately, this is about how music situates us in particular spaces (both physical and mental) and the broader social effects this has on how we relate to each other. It is a great companion piece to Jonathan Sterne’s discussion of digital audio. Here’s a small section that I found particularly interesting: 

Perhaps you too have had the experience of following GPS navigation instructions only to find yourself headed in the wrong direction, or even at the wrong address. In retrospect, the mistake is obvious: abandoning all analog clues to your whereabouts—signs, landmarks, the sun, maps, your internal sense of direction—can lead to the entirely wrong place in the physical world. While traveling, your location was digitally mapped at every moment, more precisely than it could ever be using analog information. And yet you never knew where you were heading. The blue dot was always visible, but its destination remained off screen.

Earbuds and headphones have a similar blind spot, aurally speaking. The listener on headphones is forever at the center of the soundspace, like the blue dot on a GPS map. Sounds enter that field from left or right, but they never seem to come from where we are heading: straight ahead…

The Death and Life of Digital Audio

Photo by Peter Reid