>Whether or not a nerve cell in your cochlea fires or not is digital, as is >the number of ions it releases when it fires. Thus, even when listening to >analogue recordings, by the time it reaches your brain the signal has been >digitized. Digital representations today technology may have compression >artifacts or be sampled at rates well below the ability of the human ear to >discern, but there is some level of digital fidelity at which it would be >impossible for your ear to be able to distinguish.
That description only takes into account the phenomena of sense from the outside in, where each physical tissue responds in it's own way to the stimulation of the other tissues or fluids, and the sense of the pattern is transduced from one physical form to another. From a truly objective point of view, the idea of there being a 'signal' continuity is a third person analytical conceit. In reality there are just different materials responding to each other in a way which is ultimately meaningful to us. There is no physical signal there, it's just an event being shared sequentially amongst materials. If you look at it from the inside out instead, the psyche is picking up the analog modulation of the cilia, cochlea as a whole, and to some extent the gestalt sense of the entire aural, physical event external to the ear through the sensitivity of the auditory nerves. The entire media path is collapsed, or as I say, cumulatively entangled, so that the psyche is itself semantically altered to conform to the sense of the sound event while preserving subtle traces of the entire interstitial media path. This experiential description is every bit as 'real' as the outside in, and for most purposes much more relevant as it is the signifying content of the sound that we care about, rather than the a-signifying, generic form of it's transfer. I agree there would be a level at which digital recording is indistinguishable from analog recording, but I think that it's due to the intentional gating of the sense through the psyche and media path rather than the limitations of nerve cells firing. The nerve cells themselves may experience a huge range of sensitivity which we have no conscious access to - the cochlea, maybe even more. Talking about raw sensation here, not depth/richness of interpretative qualia. Craig http://s33light.org On Jul 21, 7:16 pm, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]>wrote: > > > > > There was a lot made of the perceived difference in digital music when > > CDs first came out, in the audiophile communities particularly. I do > > think that a subtle difference can be detected but hard to know > > whether it's the digital nature itself or the processing, mixing, > > playback equipment, confirmation bias, etc. Digital music seems > > harsher, more sibilant and shallow on the percussion. It doesn't > > bother me much, but I think there could be a legitimate, if subtle > > difference stemming from the pure conversion of analog waveforms to > > digital samples. > > Whether or not a nerve cell in your cochlea fires or not is digital, as is > the number of ions it releases when it fires. Thus, even when listening to > analogue recordings, by the time it reaches your brain the signal has been > digitized. Digital representations today technology may have compression > artifacts or be sampled at rates well below the ability of the human ear to > discern, but there is some level of digital fidelity at which it would be > impossible for your ear to be able to distinguish. > > Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
