Re: [microsound] analog|digital or digilog?

[david turgeon <david.t@xxxxxxxx>]

> Does any kind of melting between analog and digital results in a digital
> solution (excepted the matter of the support)?
> Do the software implicate a digital transformation with "no point of
> return"?

hrm...  i would say there's (at least) two ways of looking at it.

knowing about the various D->A & A->D transformations occuring in a
given track may help you understand the reason behind certain aspects of
the sound, but if what you're interested in is (for some reason) knowing
whether a given work should be said to be either digital or analog, the
only point of reference is, in fact, the support.  just as a photograph
of a painting is not a painting.

yet if i see a photograph of a painting in a book, i may say "this is a
painting", & the allusion will be understood by all.  so for all
practical purposes, if you're listening to a purely digital recording of
a song produced on a good old 8-track recorder, you can still say it's
analog & no one is going to give you shit for it.

to me, the stephan mathieu record does _sound_ analog even though it is
not strictly analog.  you may even say it sounds like a mesh of analog &
digital, which would be fairly descriptive & perhaps even evocative
(it's the kind of things music critics write about, the good ones at
least).  alternately, you may encounter someone who thinks the
variationen sound digital because they don't think of analog & digital
the same way as you do ("a piano doesn't have all these high
frequencies!").

regardless of your own definition, throwing some analog into an
otherwise digital process is always sure to add a dimension to the sound
which digital processes alone can't replicate.  just as there is no
instrument on earth which will sound exactly like, say, a compression
artefact.  i always have a lot of fun mixing up digital & analog in my
own music.

now, analog microsound...  what would that be like?  (is that a
contradiction?)

~ david