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Object Lessons
Compact Disc
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning.
Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning.
Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
160 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2020
60 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 4, 2021
Short, interesting essays about the rise and fall (and rise again) of the CD as a music storage device. Lots of interesting observations. The format was specifically designed for classical music, but took off for pop and rock. Before the CD, people mostly bought new music. With the CD, more people starting creating their own "complete" music library, buying-up re-releases. The format was designed with error-correcting codes, and other tricks to make it resistant to glitches. (For example, the sounds aren't stored in linear order, but are scrambled so that a glitch on the left side can be corrected by what is stored on the right side.) So people who wanted to make art out of glitches had to do lots of experiments to find out what sort of damage would have an effect. The author goes off on tangents about the types of sound art that he finds interesting, but since I like the same stuff, I enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review