(10-09-2020, 05:01)Jerome Wrote: I read the article provided by your link. I don't understand what you are trying to say. BTW a digital piano is digital - pure and simple. It can never be analogue because the sound is produced artificially.
Hi Jerome!
You are right, in the sense, that you correctly understood what media experts babble about digital music technology.
But, even those who are nice, they excerpt their terminology from manufacturers, and industry-moguls, who themselves have no idea. The sad thing is that they actually use the technology (very advanced), but they don't even know how it works....
Anyway, the idea is, that electric instruments are amplified, and the signal (the acoustic vibration) is transduced into electromagnetic waves.
So, instead of an acoustic wave (which is a sine wave), you have now an electromagnetic wave (which also can be described by linear algebra methods).
But, why it is analogue? Because it is a continuous wave, a function, in the mathematical sense.
For instance:
z = 40y + 3
that is a mathematical function. And you can plot any mathematical function, either by hand (using pen and paper), or by Matlab, for instance. Try it. there IS a free student version for linux. There is an excellent tutorial on Dürer matrixes.
So, imagine that for every point of y, you have a z. The number of points are infinite.... They can be scaled, or I don't know.
But.... it IS a smooth function. The plotted curve (try a plotter printer :
s continuous, in the sense, that every point adheres to the next one, without a clear separating, or demarcating gap.
The nervous system is somehow similar. Perhaps this is a good analogy. Neurons connect via synapses. The signal transmission (electric signal, through ion voltage differentiation, saltatoric method) is not continuous, or it is, not sure. But there is a thing called a synaptic gap. In the synaptic gap, the signal is not electric (difference of Na+ and so on ion concentration on the outer and inner side of the neuron), but it is chemical.
Is that logical?
So, how does this connect to instruments?
Yes, a digital piano is electric. But the velocity curve is a smooth function. Whereas digital products (toy instruments, whether 4000dollars or not) have distinct number of loudness (keypress velocity) steps.
1. loud
2. moderate
3. soft
A continuous velocity curve maps the response of your finger muscles (guided by your emotions) well, whereas a discreet velocity method reduces it into something else....
Digital means anyway this, that you have a certain number of fixed values. Like the CD discs, the music in the .wav file on the disc is actually a bunch of 0s and 1s.
But, I think this is an interesting issue, because I'm not sure "velocity curve" means anything. Why does it called velocity?
Yeah, because how fast you press the keys. But does this terminology makes sense?
To me, it does not.
Krisztian
DDDD