RECORDING

Digital sampling is a purely electronic digital recording system, which takes (samples) "vertical slices" of sound and converts them into on/off information, into data, which tells a sound producing system how to reconstruct, rather than reproduce it. At a fast enough sampling rate, the detailed contours of a sound can be so minutely traced that playback quality is compatible in quality with any analogue recording system. The revolutionary power associated with the digital system was that the sound, when stored, consisted of information in a form that could be transformed, edited or rewritten electronically, without "doing" anything to any actual analogue recording, but only to a code. This really is a kind of writing. When it is stored, modified or reproduced, no grooves, magnetized traces or any other contiguous imprint link the sound to its means of storage (by imprint I mean as when an object is pressed into soft wax and leaves its analogue trace). It is stored rather as discrete data, which act as instructions for the eventual reconstruction of a sound. [Cutler 76]