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Dawkins, Professor Richard - Unweaving the Rainbow - Sound
Identifier
011829
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Professor Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow
[sound] can be broken down mathematically into a stream of numbers and it retains its power to transport and haunt the imagination. When a laser disc (CD) is made, say, of the Saint Matthew Passion, the rising and falling pressure wave, with all its wiggles and kinks, is sampled at frequent intervals and translated into digital data.
The digits could, in principle, be printed as dull black and white zeroes and ones on reams of paper. Yet the numbers retain the power, if transduced back into pressure waves, to move a listener to tears.