Science or Art? - Inside Science

Reported May 2006

BACKGROUND: Sometimes science and engineering can inspire artistic creations. Composer and artist Tristan Perich -- who also has a strong interest in physics and audio engineering along with many years' experience in computer programming -- has created a CD jewel case that plays minimal glitch dance music when headphones are plugged in, without the need for a CD player or iPod. The music itself is all 1-bit, and is generated by Perich's own software. It will be sold along other CDs in record stores, and has 11 different tracks and a skip button to move between them.

1-BIT VS. 16-BIT: Standard CDs contains 16 bits, a complex audio wave. Perich reduces this wave to only a single bit, where the music is represented by just one bit of information. All the sounds are written as MIDI files in the zeros and ones of conventional binary code. Bits are bundled together into 8-bit packages, and these packages are known as bytes. Bit depth refers to the number of bits you have to capture audio in a "snapshot" of the sound being recorded. The sample rate is the number of times the audio is measured each second. A bit rate is how much data per second required to transmit the file. This is a lot of data, which is why MP3 music files compress it, sacrificing some of the data in the process, to varying degrees. How much data is lost determines the difference in sound quality between a CD and an MP3 file.

HOW IT WORKS: The playable CD jewel case squeezes an album's worth of music onto a tiny 8-kilobyte microchip, with a clock speed of 8 MHz. The electronics and battery are housed inside the clear plastic CD case, along with volume, power and track-skip controls. Listeners can plug headphones directly into the side of the case with no need for a separate CD or MP3 player.

ABOUT DIGITAL MEDIA: A CD is little more than a round piece of very thin plastic that is imprinted with microscopic bumps, or pits, arranged in a very long spiral track of data. A laser scans the disk to read the pattern of bumps that contain the encoded audio files. In any digital recording the goal is to achieve very high fidelity (similarity between the original sound and the reproduced sound) and perfect reproduction (the recording sounds the same every time you play it). So the analog sound wave -- the vibrations created in the air by, for example, live music -- is converted into a stream of numbers encoded into the bumps on the CD.

If you would like more information, please contact:

Tristan Perich
mail@tristanperich.com
http://www.onebitmusic.com

For more information on engineering inventions:

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE-USA
1828 L Street, N.W., Suite 1202
Washington, D.C. 20036-5104
(202) 785-0017
ieeeusa@ieee.org
http://www.ieee.org

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