Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Storing Sound

How does God store sound?

Could the sounds be loops? In that case, how would God remember the beginning of the loop after it had passed? It would cease to exist.

Could sound be something that can be sliced up into static samples, like with visual information? We tend to think of sound as inherently temporal, while there can be such a thing as "still" images. From a physical science point of view (from that kind of "poetry"), there is no such thing as a still image (if things haven't changed from when I picked up my basic knowledge of light). Basically, all images that we perceive are caused by flows of electrons, whether we take them to be particles or waves. So without time passing, they wouldn't exist.

However, I think it is very possible to perceive a still image. Maybe it can only be perceived in time, but the image itself does not change.

I think the same goes for tactile sensations, and I'm pretty sure also for smell and taste. But perhaps it is not as true for hearing?

If I listen to a pure, simple sine wave, that seems pretty static to me. So maybe God stores all auditory experience data as sine waves, and then does synthesis to make our experiences of sound, with whatever complexity there is in them.

It occurred to me as I thought about this that if you synthesize sounds, you have to have information guiding how you synthesize it. That information could be stored in some other medium, perhaps visually. Then it occurred to me that soundtracks to films are encoded visually. All you need is some way to decode the light patterns into the audio that we experience.

This post satisfies me for now that God can store audio, even if the storage medium has to be static.

No comments:

Post a Comment