A few weeks ago, I recorded a couple of new songs on Garageband. I was working with my guitarist, Matt Howorth - arguably London’s finest living songwriter. He was doing all the hard stuff - song-writing, playing guitar, singing. I arranged the drums. An inequitable division of labour, you may think.
Anyway.
We finished the song - “Let It Roll” (not the UFO version, obviously) - and it sounded astounding. Massive guitars, rock-solid drumming, and layers of detail. String noise, breaths, texture. The stuff that makes music come alive. The sound file was 200Mb. Huge.
To publish, we compressed it to an MP3. The sound file was now 5Mb. And the sound was... not quite the same. It was still recognisably the same song, but there was something missing. Hard to say what, but definitely something.
Then I did the maths. By compressing from 200Mb to 5Mb, we had lost 97.5% of the musical information. In other words, nearly all of it. What was left was a sketch of the art, but it wasn’t the art.
And this summed up for me the problem of much of the digital world. An eBook is a sketch of a book, but it’s not a book. An MP3 is a sketch of a song, but it’s not a song. There’s always something missing.
Duncan MacDougall deduced that the weight of the human soul is 21 grammes - the weight that is lost when a person expires, and the soul passes from the body. I think that there is something similar at work when the music is compressed and the soul leaves the song.
How do we recover it?
My next experiment will be called “Return to Planet Vinyl”.
I think that’s where I will find the soul.