Music from Bits

Watch someone use a computer today. Notice that she deals with three media: text, sound, and pictures (including video). It is easy to see how text can be stored and manipulated by a computer, because the text is itself discrete in nature. But sound and pictures, although we take them for granted on today’s computers, are first of all analog in nature. To get back and forth between the analog and digital worlds of audio and video, we need the A-to-D and D-to-A converters mentioned in chapter 1, and these were not fast enough, small enough, or cheap enough until