Dithering: The Sound of Sound
Economic and technological forces are forcing certain media (magnetic tape, vinyl) off the table. New advantages (speed of acquisition, portability, large affinity groups) are replacing old ones (tactile pleasures, granular quality, in-person conversation). There’s plenty to talk about. I’ve watched young music fans experience the sound of a turntable for the first time, thrown out a pair of earbuds I later decided to retrieve from a city garbage can, stared at a graph of sine waves until I got dizzy, and downloaded every MP3 encoding program I thought my computer might run. I’ve spoken to stars, salesmen, engineers, and authors. I’ve cursed the whanging distortion of of MP3s amplified in dance clubs, stared at the reels of two-inch tape storing my band’s multitrack recordings, and read newspaper pieces about the death of the sound file and the imminent takeover of streaming audio.
