elgrau 84 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 While enjoying my new remastered Beatles CD set, I started thinking about the fact that this total digitized collection is "just" a sequence of bits, each of which can either be (and ONLY be) one or zero. Therefore, this "collection" of music is simply one out of 2 to the Nth power music "collections", where N = the total number of bits of information in the total collection of all the songs. This means that one could generate a DIGITIZED exact copy of this ENTIRE Beatles collection of songs "simply" by generating ALL of the possible bit combinations (which would ALSO generate ALL of the "missing" Beatles songs that they never recorded ). And without knowing a THING about music, our culture, or ANYTHING! Of course you'd need probably about 10 million times the length of time that our universe has existed (and probably a lot longer of course unless you developed some sort of "pruning" technique to "prune out" the "threads" of collections that "went to garbage" after several seconds of "music" which would be like 99.99999999....out to a HUGE number of nines percent of ALL the threads!) to "sort out" all the "songs" from the "trash"! But none the less, it could be done, which leads me to my point: with ANALOG music (say the grooves of a record) you COULD NOT do this because the "heighth" of the groove at each time slice you pick has INFINITE variation. You could NEVER reproduce the entire Beatles song collection (no matter how much time you had) by randomily varying the grove's ANALOG amplitude at each time slice (and does not matter how fine or coarse you do the time slices)! This "thought experiment" tells me this: the analog version of the songs is MORE unique than the digital version and thus contains more information, and is in fact the one and ONLY "Beatles collection" in the universe and thus is of higher fidelity than ANY digitized version of the music could EVER be! In conclusion: ANALOG recordings will ALWAYS be more "true" to the original live recording than DIGITAL could EVER POSSIBLY be (no matter how "advanced" digital EVER becomes)! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snow 207 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 Anyone ever tell you you think too much? REGARDS SNOW Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 5, 2010 Author Share Posted January 5, 2010 Maybe too much "brain food complex" (from www.heathline.cc) coupled with too much caffiene. Whatever; just thoughts and this IS a forum afterall! Better than a steady string of "Welcome aboard, xyz!" newbie posts that some members only contribute! But that fine too! It's all good, Snow! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillD 239 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 Of course, you would also generate all the music of every other artist while doing this. So, your pruning algorithm could be to take out your least favorite artists. But, you'd still have zillions of combinations that don't amount to music, text or anything else. Keyboards and monkeys come to mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snow 207 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 Maybe too much "brain food complex" (from www.heathline.cc) coupled with too much caffiene. Whatever; just thoughts and this IS a forum afterall! Better than a steady string of "Welcome aboard' date=' xyz "newbie" posts that some members only contribute! But that fine too! It's all good, Snow![/quote'] I see, well I tell you what why dont you go FUCK YOURSELF HOWS THAT FOR CONTRIBUTING? SNOW Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balok 1,422 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 In a way, this is analogous to DNA. A whole bunch of random sequences of A-T and C-G eventually led to all living things on earth. (depending on your beliefs) The "pruning" technique would then be "natural selection". Only the good songs would survive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 5, 2010 Author Share Posted January 5, 2010 yep; good analogy, Balok....order vs chaos. But hard for me to believe that "natural selection" accounts for all that order in DNA that leads to the extremely complicated "tunes" that we are. Just like how much time it would take to "list out" all the bit combinations that lead to "songs", I don't believe "natural selection" has had nearly enough time to create the proper DNA that makes living beings! Easier to believe some "Beatles" created the basic order of these "tunes" and "natural selection" ("Producer" George Martin?) fine tuned them . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balok 1,422 Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 Understood. I still can't believe that a cone of kevlar and a cone of aluminun can vibrate and make me think that Eric Clapton is playing in my living room and then vibrate again (visually looks the same) but now Joni Mitchell is singing in my living room etc etc. I watched a PBS program on "NOVA" last week and it was discussing some interesting things about DNA. It is interesting that many life forms are very similar genetically, yet look very different. It is believed now that there are bits of DNA code that are responsible to turn ON and OFF other bits of DNA and that there are other DNA sequences that control the timing of when the ON or OFF is actually done. They were comparing the different Finches on the Golapagos islands. The beak varies on each of the different finches, yet the DNA code for the beak is the same in each species. What they discovered was the development of the beak during embryological stage started at slightly different times and ended at different times and therefore the structure was slightly different. In music, there are basic forms, (such as "three chord theory", 12 bar blues, 8 bar blues etc) that make up a huge amount of modern music, yet differences in timing, key, etc produce "different" songs. Structurally, they are very similar. I don't know if any of this means anything, but it is interesting to discuss. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 5, 2010 Author Share Posted January 5, 2010 yes interesting (DNA "alive")...I had a post ready to go about just how many different "threads"/combinations of music there are in ~10 hours of digitized music: "2 raised to the power of 17,620,000,000" (17,620,000,000 ~=number of bits in 10 hours of music at 44k Hz samples per second and 8 bits of amplitude resolution per sample which is ~ how long the Beatles remastered set is). My calculator "overflowed" trying to calc that number! And even at one microsecond to "listen" to each of these "music collections" it would still take a very LONG time to "hear" them all and discard all the "junk"! But computer crashed, and all those "bits" were lost! add: even more "troubling" (digitized music wise) is that based on this there are "only" 2 raised to the power of 63,360,000 POSSIBLE 3 minute "pop songs"! Once you've heard these, you've heard them ALL! Which (since we know there is really an infinite number of 3 minute songs "out there") gets back to the "fidelity" issue: this infinite number of songs MUST each be "approximated" by one of those "2 raised to the power of 63,360,000" POSSIBLE digitized representations. Obviously some fidelity must be lost as each of these digitized songs must "stand in" for a whole infinity of songs that are "almost" like the one digitized song! I rest my case of digital vs analog fidelity! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monte3x 4 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 elgrau -- i've lost faith in the remastered 'Tomorrow Never Knows' being able to deliver you the alluded to out of body experience when it's quite clear that you are already having an out of mind experience this math shitstorm you've whipped up here is making my brain hurt. i'm gonna have to go switch out my cables and listen to some AC/DC to get things working right again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TNRabbit 370 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 All I know is, I sit in the sweet spot & drift away~ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 6, 2010 Author Share Posted January 6, 2010 "But, you'd still have zillions of combinations that don't amount to music, text or anything else.." Yep BillD; "2 to the 12 billionth power" is a HUGE number! Just realized that ALL these songs ("missing" Beatles tunes, etc., etc.) would ALSO be there in ALL languages, backwards, forwards, sped up, slowed down, with tuned instruments, with instruments out of tune every way imaginable, etc., etc.! Yep, "2 to the 12 billion power" is a BIG number! Take that, monte3x's brain! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weitrhino 1,425 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 Most of those random combinations would be nothing more than abhorrent noise. Springsteen comes to mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 6, 2010 Author Share Posted January 6, 2010 yep; by FAR most would be! And here's a question only God himself could answer: what percentage of all those songs in all those "2 to 12 billionth power" 10 hour "music collections" would actually be "valid" songs? (in any current earthly language)?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jvandyke_texas 432 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 Analog doesn't have infinite variation. You would soon hit the noise floor. A typical record is 68 dB. A CD is about 100 dB. Music isn't random. There's high correlation across samples. There's a lot fewer possible listenable songs than you might first imagine. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 6, 2010 Author Share Posted January 6, 2010 "Analog doesn't have infinite variation" I tend to disagree: Noise floor has nothing to do with it: Let's say that the record "groove cutter" has a "valid" (out of noise floor and below "clipping") amplitude range of +/-X inches. UNLESS the "cutter positioning" device is digital (I think not...no such animal back when records were 1st "cut"!), there is (just like in the number line) an INFINITE number of locations between -X" and +X"! If not, which position can this ANALOG positioning device not "get to" as it sweeps between these two limits? Answer: NONE. So at each and every location along the record groove you have an INFINITE number of possible amplitudes....not to mention an INFINITE number of groove locations for each of these infinite amplitude values (not just 44,000 per second of DIGITIZED music with a "measly" ~256 possible amplitudes!). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balok 1,422 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 There's a lot fewer possible listenable songs than you might first imagine. Top 40 radio is proof of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elgrau 84 Posted January 6, 2010 Author Share Posted January 6, 2010 "There's a lot fewer possible listenable songs than you might first imagine" True, true....However, you still have to concede that for each and every one of these songs, you'd have them in ALL languages, backwards (just the bit stream reversed), forwards, a lot out tune, a little out of tune.....in "pig latin", with the singer having a "cold", a lisp, a hairlip, on and on and on. A SHITLOAD of songs! add: not to mention EVERY combination of part "lisp", part pig latin, part out of tune part in tune, etc., etc! 2 to the 12 billion = (if my math is right) = 10^3.6 billion! And with "only" ~10 to the 80th power ATOMS in the known universe, 10 to the 3.6 billion "song collections" is therefore enough songs for the ATOMS in 45 MILLION universes of "our" known universe's size....like I said, it a BIG number of song collections! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monte3x 4 Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 I have a hard time believing the Beatles are really responsible for all of this... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TNRabbit 370 Posted January 7, 2010 Share Posted January 7, 2010 Most of those random combinations would be nothing more than abhorrent noise. Springsteen comes to mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillD 239 Posted January 7, 2010 Share Posted January 7, 2010 Have you heard the Dylan Christmas CD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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