Folks who visit the site must sometimes wonder about the constant references to music.
Well, guess what - I love it. It is the one thing in life that has truly
helped me to understand some of the more complex issues in telecommunications.
Glorious musical works like Ludwig Van Beethoven's "Pastorale Symphony" or Bruce Springsteen's "New York City Serenade" resound not only in the heart, but in the logical thought process.
Several years ago - a singer/songwriter, Don McClean wrote a powerful tune about "the day
the music died" - American Pie.
Of course, music has never died in the heart of the human spirit.
However, it has died in the American classroom! Someone, somewhere in some School District decided that they could nolonger justify the cost of teaching music. "Gee, kids can buy albums, CDs, tapes and stuff. Why should we teach it?"
Pretty soon, several School Districts across the country embraced this concept
because it made their "budget" bottom-line look good, and besides; "kids aren't interested in Mahler or Lizst or Copeland."
But here's what they forgot.
The music of Springsteen, Prince, Morrisette, Beethoven, Mahler, Lizst and Copeland stand as testaments of mankind and
what we are all about!
Within that music; both in the recording and on the written page, lies the heart and soul of the human spirit.
Music dances and weaves it's way through a musical highway. It synchs-up in clustered notes: (32nds, 16ths, 8ths, 4ths, 2nd's, and whole notes). It possesses
a tempo, syncopation, emotions, words and information that speaks to us across the ages.
When Bruce Springsteen goes into the studio to record a new song - he thinks in terms of
the human condition and maybe wonders that if he changed the Key or the Tempo in the third verse of
a particular song - it just may give that song more emotive power and help convey a truer meaning to the
theme of the track.
Of course, to do this the E Street Band have to totally re-record the track. Maybe?
Springsteen's Sound Engineer - Bob Clearmountain is thinking - "What if we recorded it on the old Analog Equipment
and then Digitally re-mixed it"?
Clearmountain is living in the world where the Binary Numbering System
is used to span Analog and Digital Technology! His focus is on how best to
represent Springsteen's song to the listener. It does not take him long to figure out that
Pulse Code Modulation is the way to go!
And so to the 8-Bit spin:
Some basics.
- 0 and 1 is all we're dealing with. 2 numbers as in the "Bi" in Binary.
- 1 Bit is either a 0 or 1
- 1 Byte is 8 Bits as in 00000000 or 0
- 0 is the min - 255 is the max. Total = 256 as
in 256 colors on your Desktop (8 Bit color)
- Yes, there are negative binary numbers but let's not worry about them here.
Remember now that we are dealing with the Voice Path, and in the 8 Kbps world
of voice communications - we use the 8-Bit Binary concept quantized by Pulse
Code Modulation.
But let's focus on 8-Bit Binary Numbers for the rest of this page.
Here's how they work. The table is basically self-explanatory. If I verbalize it - you'd
probably give up and tell me to "Get a life, dude!".
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Get it?
If you do - then check out how it ties in with electricity on the next page which will
be up in the next week or so.
I close with a question:
Should kids be taught music in school? Your call......
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