If a recording of someones very rare voice is representable by mp4 or whatever, could monkeys typing out code randomly exactly reproduce their exact timbre+tone+overall sound?
I don’t get how we can get rocks to think + exactly transcribe reality in the ways they do!
Edit: I don’t get how audio can be fossilized/reified into plaintext
While I will be the first person to admit that I don’t completely understand either, the concept is pretty simple.
Think of a digital recording being something like sheet music. Sheet music is a set of instructions on how to play a song that anyone who knows how to read music can reproduce.
Digital recordings work in a similar fashion. The playback device reads the instructions which include things like frequency and volume, and is able use that information to make a perfect playback of the digital recording.
Could it be recreated by random chance? Sure. Would it? Probably not. At least not easily.
Long list of numbers in sequence. Each represents how far away from equilibrium the speaker cone should be, at each point in time, as it vibrates back and forth.
I just think its crazy I can record a random recording right now or me speaking and that can be stored in what must ultimately be good old-fashioned plaintext or whatever.
Like, thats a rock thinking and turning sound right into stone, wayyyyy more impressive and beneficial than alchemy turning lead into gold
It doesn’t get encoded in to plaintext. First, the microphone picks up the sounds, and outputs values for frequencies and intensities. Recording software takes those values, and compresses them down into binary data. Then that binary data is saved onto storage. Depending on your storage, it’s then stored magnetically (cassette, floppy, HDD) or as a “lockable” logic gate (USB, SSD) or as laser etched dots and dashes (CD/DVD)
It’s not getting turned in to rocks, it’s getting written on media.
Also, some number for scale…
My computer has 3.5ghz processors. It can run 3.5 billion instructions every second. To put that in perspective, the smallest unit of time humans can perceive is ~13ms. That processor can run ~270,000 instructions in that time frame. Computers perform very simple tasks, extremely quickly, and it gives the impression of intelligence.
But how can it capture perfectly my exact voice or the exact timbre of whatever stuff is playing. Like, its mind-blowing to me and I have nothing i can analogize it to. Its incredible we can even take pictures with pixels, sound is just a whole notha level that astounds me