Digitization
The arrival of the computer brought about great changes in electroacoustics, including a democratization of access to equipment, improvements in their quality, reduction in their costs and the possibility of transforming sound without any degradation in its quality. It also allows the composer to store sounds and manipulate them using one or more forms of synthesis and to use it as a multitracking tool, etc. All this is made possible through digitization, a method of representing objects or signals as a series of integers. Once gathered, this digitized data can be stored, transmitted, modified, etc.

This is quite different from the analogue system, which is a system constituted of continuous and variable values. As an example, in an analogue system, radio and television signals are transmitted as continuous electrical waveforms. With digitization, these signals are coded (interpreted) as a series of binary numbers, themselves grouped on a higher level by another series of binary numbers (groups of 0’s and 1’s). The digital signal is thus composed of a discontinuous ensemble of binary numbers — a digital file — that the computer can read, write and alter incessantly without any loss of information. In short, the flexibility for which digital technologies are known is due to the fact that any signal can be reduced to a series of integers (0, 1), uuuuuuuuuuhhhh which can be, among other things, sounds.

Digitization has had a major impact in all the areas covered up to this point: interfaces (sound recording and reproduction); processing and transformation (sound synthesis, reverb, equalization, compression, etc.), compositional processes, editing, mastering, CD publication, etc.

Digital technology has also made a great impact on the way composers work, some using it for its potential, while others are interested in exploring its limits, or its defects. Some subversive or parallel movements have grown out of an interest in the latter. These include “hardware hacking” (alteration of a circuit or piece of equipment to produce results the technology was not intended to produce) and “lowercase” (exploration of digital noises and errors which continue to exist in the systems despite the efforts of developers to suppress them).

We can say, without any exaggeration, that the large majority of contemporary technological progress has been made possible through the advent of this technique, which is without a doubt one of the most important innovations in the history of technology.