Word: analog
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...course itself includes hands-on instruction in both analog and digital electronics. Analog systems use electronic oscillators, filters, tapes, and other means to create and manipulate sounds. Digital electronics, in contrast, use computers to create, reproduce, and modify sounds. Harvard's array of digital equipment in Paine Hall includes a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, a Mirage synthesizer, and an Apple Macintosh computer, as well as a rack of digital effects, mixers, and tape decks. Through an electronic interface called MIDI, the computer can be used to sequence the various synthesizers and to modify sonic waveforms. One interesting feature of the Mirage...
Other computing machines of that era solved mathematical problems in one of two ways. Either they estimated the solutions, using mechanical analog devices like slide rules and differential gears, or they computed them digitally, using the on-off action of slow-moving electromagnetic telephone switches. ENIAC, by contrast, was the first digital computer both to store and to process information with vacuum tubes; as a result, it was able to perform calculations 1,000 times as fast as its electromechanical predecessors. "I was convinced that you could produce great speeds electronically if you put your mind to it," says Eckert...
...waves cut into vinyl grooves. When a diamond or sapphire stylus passes over them, its vibrations create a tiny electrical current that is converted back into sound. Tape players work in a similar way, reading sound from magnetized particles on plastic ribbon. Both methods involve a process known as analog recording, in which the music is represented as a physical replica, or analog, of the original sound. The chief drawback in each case is that the phonograph stylus or tape head rides constantly on the playing surface. This causes wear and distortion that come across as hissing and crackling sounds...
Digital sound, recorded by a computer and played back with a laser beam, offers brighter highs and truer lows than conventional analog recording techniques, and eliminates compression and distortion as well. The CD medium has several other practical advantages: most players can be programmed to select cuts in any sequence or repeat a favorite indefinitely; the discs never wear out, since only light touches their surface, and with up to 74 minutes of music on the one usable side, they never have to be flipped over. Finally, they are as easily stored as tapes, yet offer amenities (liner notes, opera...
Instead of making sound by physical means, the way a piano does when its hammers strike the strings, the synthesizer generates tones electronically. Older analog models employed a battery of oscillators, filters and amplifiers, both to produce and to alter the color of sound. Their newer digital cousins are to analogs what compact disc record players are to the ordinary turntable; they represent each point on the sonic spectrum with a series of numbers programmed into the machine. Synthesizers can go beyond standard intervals (the white and black keys of a piano) to register quarter tones and microtones. They...