What does your digital music actually go through?

[javidguliyev]

When providing a master to a specific platform your song most likely will be altered by that specific platform. Take normalization for example.
Each platform will have a specific let's say (for the sake of simplicity) compression levels which will compress your song. Now what actually
happens to the master. It gets affected. The mix balance you have been working on is not there anymore and god knows what else is there besides
normalization. How many dbs of YOUR music get altered?
Same goes for image processing. You create a picture and certain gradients are added the same way an equalizer works in audio. I mean at the
end of the day it is just frequencies. Am I right?

If you look at signal processing the same way you are looking at let's say pressing a key on the piano it may become obvious that it IS IMPORTANT
who is pressing the keys. Each person will have a different sound while pressing the key even though the frequencies of the sound remain the same.
What happens in the digital world of internets is that you are ACTUALLY pressing a key. However what happens to it is not actually up to you
and you may already know why lol. The altered signal will sound nothing like your original simply because it is not you who is messing with it
right after it goes through a certain platform (could be any music software like media player).

I was just wondering about that AND if any of you have any thoughts on this.

 

[javidguliyev]

When providing a master to a specific platform your song most likely will be altered by that specific platform. Take normalization for example.
Each platform will have a specific let's say (for the sake of simplicity) compression levels which will compress your song. Now what actually
happens to the master. It gets affected. The mix balance you have been working on is not there anymore and god knows what else is there besides
normalization. How many dbs of YOUR music get altered?
Same goes for image processing. You create a picture and certain gradients are added the same way an equalizer works in audio. I mean at the
end of the day it is just frequencies. Am I right?

If you look at signal processing the same way you are looking at let's say pressing a key on the piano it may become obvious that it IS IMPORTANT
who is pressing the keys. Each person will have a different sound while pressing the key even though the frequencies of the sound remain the same.
What happens in the digital world of internets is that you are ACTUALLY pressing a key. However what happens to it is not actually up to you
and you may already know why lol. The altered signal will sound nothing like your original simply because it is not you who is messing with it
right after it goes through a certain platform (could be any music software like media player).

I was just wondering about that AND if any of you have any thoughts on this.

NOW, if everything listed above is true, a world of possibilities opens up. First and foremost we must actually analyze what it is we are actually doing when we are creating art such as music(audio) or cinema(video) or photography(image) in DIGITAL world.
What do they all have in common? Well, the answer is very simple. For starters if we are working with digital FILES we are, well, working with digital files.
Therefore, we must analyze how files are created and how files are created? well, through computer language called binary.
Now I am not an expert in programming, however, logic dictates that in order to create a file you must use binary. I will explain.
When mixing for instance loops such as in hip hop for example you are using someone else's code if we look at it in terms of binary.
Someone else recorded --> the file and translated it into binary if you will. So you are using someone else's art.
A simple bypass to this logical problem if you are interested in this topic as much as I am is very simple. Any binary editor will do.
The code of a hip hop loop for example could be opened in any binary editor and recreated using a simple "save as command"
Now, you have a new file. A completely different file from the original.