In yesterday's post about the language of music we touched on a few similarities: Letters form words, musical notes generate melodies.
When I think about big picture concepts like these I try and pull myself away from the details and get a birds eye view of the whole magilla. That often involves imagining our civilization halting (jeez, how many ways could that happen?) and what happens when future people looking at our artifacts try to figure out what they all mean. Think about how we struggled for so long to understand ancient languages like Cuneiform.
So, when I imagine our future selves looking back at a musical score it wouldn't be an act of genius to relate the up and down notes on a staff representing higher and lower frequencies.
But, our music—heck our everything—is being converted into a language only machines can understand. Imagine our descendents trying to figure out what a CD or even a vinyl record was, or the data on a hard drive. Without the machines necessary to convert that data into a form understandable by our eyes and ears I cannot imagine how future people might make heads or tails out of any of it.
Today, much of this data lies hidden from us because our machines are able to read it and interface with us—so we don't bother looking.
One of the more in-your-face technologies is something many of us see on a regular basis.
The QR (Quick Response) Code.
Got any idea what that image is telling you?
Imagine you're a future descendent looking at that image and trying to reason what the heck it is. (It says Hello World).
As we delve deeper into the conversion process of everything, including music, into these indecipherable forms of storage and playback, it's perhaps ok for us audiophiles to not fully grasp everything going on behind the twist of a knob or the push of a remote control.
Sometimes it's ok just to hit play, close our eyes, and let the music wash over us.
