Take a look around the part of the universe you’re in right now. Even though each of us is in different parts, our environments are quite similar. I’m not talking about the computer screen we’re staring at or the planet we’re standing on. I’m talking about vibrations, and their offspring—waves.

Be it light, sound, the Golden Gate Bridge or the ocean beneath it, everything in our universe, at some level, produces or is produced by waves. Maybe that is why music is so important to the human condition. It is a confluence of waves in harmony and dissonance, rhythm and melody—the ultimate metaphor for life, nature, maybe even God (Goddess, providence, higher power, Allah, Gaia, Yahweh, Bono). But when we are receiving music or any other group of wave, such as those from a budding rose or a sunset, we aren’t consciously aware of the frequency of cycles, the waveforms, the vibrations of electrons and photons and neurons. We’re simply taking in something beautiful. Then we move on with samples of those vibrations stored in our brainwaves to be reprocessed again and again as our oldest and dearest friend (and enemy): memory.

There is a limitation we humans have with regards to our environment. We can’t see the waves, we see only light, hear only Little Wing, feel only the coiled velvet of a rose bloom. Such dense things these humans are, denser still their universe of waves. How thin our perception of the world. Oh, the information our senses disregard just so we can function without getting eaten by a Mammoth, or run down by an Escalade.

Waves are natural. Converting them to math and back again is not, even though the processing of the math and movement of numbers depends on waves moving at a specific frequency.* It really is a bit of alchemy when you think about it. Take someone with a large soul who stopped vibrating on the planet years ago—Janis Joplin—through a complicated mathematical pattern of waves we can still hear her voice in our ears. We can feel her spirit with ours—in real-time, no less. Wow. But for some, listening to a digital reproduction of this very analog thing doesn’t sound quite right. So turn it up, because everything sounds better loud. Of course, CDs certainly don’t sound bad, but technically speaking they are missing many things that were present in the artist’s original creation. But we accept this limitation because CDs have become the norm, and all things considered, they really do beat today’s conventional music media formats.

When Janis sang and Big Brother played, any imperfections within the performances were within the boundaries of art. All art is imperfect, especially in rock ‘n’ roll. Make it perfect and it’s no longer art, because it’s no longer human. When you buy Janis on CD, around 25% of that (or any) disc is nothing but errors. But every zero and one that constitutes music on a CD is duplicated several times over with the hopes that one of them will be “right” and that the system will find the right one (or zero) and process it fast enough to make Janis sound perfect, including the original imperfections that helped make it art in the first place. All this has its advantages, which we’ve all come to know and take for granted. But the coldness of machinery and math remains imprinted on the digital Piece of My Heart. Those who knew vinyl records well will never forget that, once upon a time, the only coldness you got off of an album came from the artist’s emotions, or from the producer for effect; and those who don’t will come to believe that an inhuman coldness is simply a part of music. That it was there all along.

So then you take this cold and perfect thing, and you strip away things that were there in the performance and the production so you can make it smaller—because if you make it smaller you can carry more of them with you. With broadband internet access and big fat flash memory, there really is no other reason.** It’s the sonic equivalent to pizza rolls. It tastes a bit like a real pie and has some of the same ingredients, but nobody’s fooled—unless pizza rolls are all you know, ya poor bastard. And so I pity the mp3 generation every bit as much as I envy them. Working in music production and pro audio, I will probably grow angry with them, too. Because what am I going to do with this expensive gear designed to provide subtle nuances that first will be captured coldly, then stripped out entirely so the listener can hear the tune on a bus? There once was a note—LISTEN, motherfucker! A sultry reverb tail on a beautiful harmony—gone to save room and a little time; the subtle character and warm sizzle of a properly miked cymbal array, an acoustic guitar down in the bed to give a bit of warmth and depth to the mix—the painstaking amount of effort and spirit spent creating a lush sonic universe four minutes long and stereo wide is condensed into something black and white, on or off, one or zero.

Imagine Van Gogh with only primary colors that shant be mixed because all the subtle hues take too long to process or too much space to store. Ah, but that’s an unfair comparison because rock ‘n’ roll music is more forgiving than most other art forms. It is the limited (if not quite forgiving) nature of our ears that helped birth the mp3 as a popular music format. Take two sounds with similar pitches in the same place (time)—one being quieter than the other—the louder one is more important according to psycho-acoustic principles, the softer one we will probably not miss so delete it and save a few bytes. This is a fundamental of mp3 compression. Likewise, for two sounds being close together in the stereo field (place), with one played shortly before or after the other. The bones in our ears can only respond so quickly, so slay the quieter or later one as if it was never played.

But they were there for a reason, weren’t they? The artist agonized over their existence, suffering to bear them every bit as much as Van Gogh did over the subtle shades of Mulberry leaves in autumn. Isn’t that what made him a master? What about the attacks that our ears are so sensitive to? Maybe we won’t pick up the entire acoustic guitar, but we’ll definitely get those attacks. Ears love attacks. And what about the decay as the sound leaves us for the ether, the long goodbye of the last note departing us tenderly like the final moments of slow death? In real life, the cries of a guitar linger, then fade, then vanish, leaving us with the ghost of a wave that made us feel deeply. What profound moments the boundaries of silence are, and how profoundly inadequate mp3s are in recreating them.

The science behind the mp3 is built on the premise that we only hear with our ears. Every parent knows better, and rock ‘n’ roll proves this wrong. Rock was born out of our ability and need to feel music in our chest and our crotch and our skin. This is how music gets to the brain and the soul; not just through our ears, but through our entire body. But it takes more than a loud amp and kick drum to take advantage of this phenomenon. It takes that intangible thing that makes Englishmen into Beatles and Stones, and Americans into Jeff Buckley and Janis Joplin. Maybe that’s it. Given the number of bands making music to listen to on the bus, perhaps mp3s are the natural medium for mediocrity. I mean, do you really need immediate access to 500 songs? Or just a few dozen great ones that make you sweat or weep?

There once was a note…

* The speed of your computer’s CPU is specified in MHz and now GHz (Gigahertz). That number tells us the frequency or number of cycles (complete oscillations of a wave) per second the processor operates at which translates to speed. Frequency of waves (cycl
es) is also used to define and measure music notes, light and colors.

**Nowadays, you can download an entire album of uncompressed CD Audio in about a half an hour. But it will use up to 10 times more space than mp3s of the same album.

» Previously: Rushing to MP3