Shades of Gray (The Perfect Mirror)

 I find myself thinking about the difference between digital and analog information, from time to time. Most of us think of music when we think of the two. A lot of my friends still listen to analog media like records, but we are the minority (live music aside.) Almost everyone seems to own a digital music/media player these days, and are satisfied with the sound quality.

Perhaps one of the reasons I still enjoy listening to records is the quality. The word 'quality' itself is usually used in conjunction with the idea of high or low. But quality is closer in meaning to the word 'character.' Records and tapes have a different character than digital music.

First off, no two records are alike! This was of recent concern for Richard D. James. His record company wanted to release his AFX 'Analords' Series on CD format (cramping the whole title of the series itself.) At first only the vinyls were released because he wanted the uniqueness of each record being pressed from hot plastic, cooling and taking on certain imperfections; an attribute that most musicians and artists wouldn't be without.

Second, record players and needles aren't perfect. Even the best ones are just as susceptible to dust buildup, and of course degradation of the groove. The result is a kind of static noise that increases with scratching and age. The thing is, it's a rather charming sound.

Digital, on the other hand, is always identical, and either plays back the same every time, or it 'glitches' when data is unreadable. The glitches are not particularly charming, although they've earned a place in electronic hip hop. The playback is identical on every CD because the files are identical. They are based on an analog = continuous wave, but they are actually a relatively accurate discontinuous approximation of that wave. Instead of ramps and slopes for waves, we've got tiny little square steps.

At this point, you may be wondering what the title has to do with anything. I'm getting to that. One point that I always wondered about, regarding digital music, is the playback system. The speakers. Speakers are all analog. Even 'digital sound' is a misnomer. Speakers vibrate (continuously) forwards and backward, vibrating the air in analog waves, and this is the sound that vibrates our organic, analog eardrums. So is there really a difference?

Well, one problem, practically speaking, is that sound is particle-based. The physical universe seems to manifest largely around particles. While we know analog is supposed to be continuous we also know from physics that the universe is not infinite, and that when we get inside an atom, there are discrete (discontinuous) energy bands. Continuity no longer exists, it seems. Everything is small pieces, like digital information.

Let me give an example. What's the difference between gray and silver? The colour, or lack thereof seems to be the same. But silver can be many colours depending on what colours surround the silver object. Imagine a gray sheet of paper. You wouldn't be able to see it (it would look black) if it didn't reflect light. If it reflected light perfectly, like a mirror, it should look silver. What we get with a gray surface is the picture on the left. The surface is not actually smooth. Diffuse reflection occurs, and we have some kind of gray tone.
In a mirror, the surface should be as flat as possible to reflect an image completely, intact.

Interestingly, if we zoom in to the picture above, we should be able to find a small enough space where the surface is acting like a mirror. If we zoom in too close, we reach the atomic level, where the structure is no longer 'flat' and the idea of a mirror no longer makes sense.

Strange though, that every gray surface should have some mirror pieces, if we zoom into the right level. But those pieces no doubt reflect an image too small to be practical. Zoom out of the small mirror pieces, and we're back to gray. Now imagine a seemingly perfect mirror. Isn't it just part of a much larger surface of gray? What if we were building a huge telescope and needed a huge mirror? The larger the mirror, the more likely it is to have some imperfection somewhere, relegating it somewhere near the 'perfect mirror' on a continuum that must look like this:

So basically, if we get too small, things lose meaning and analog doesn't seem to exist (from a particle point of view.) And since the universe is not infinite in size, we can see a similar problem zooming out. We find a similar imperfection with sound waves which travel by vibrating a finite number of molecules. The molecules are discontinuous! It may as well be called 'digital sound' then. This may be seriously troubling for a minority of people, but I believe it adds a certain uniqueness, a nice character to our universe, and it adds meaning to my life to know that perfection exists in the realm of ideals, and not in the physical universe.

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・【Learning Lucky New Things】2010.02.03 (Wed)