Tuesday, October 10, 2006

this post is already out of date

I was sitting around today while working on some new music in Logic and thinking about how unbelievable the technological world is that we live in today. Take for instance just my own little world of Logic sequencing. To do what I'm doing today would have taken multi tens of thousands of dollars in hardware samplers to achieve 10 years ago. 5 years ago it would have necessitated networking my Mac to two external PC Gigastudios. Now, everything just runs - completely fine - within my Mac and I'm running 83 separate tracks of audio and sample data simultaneously. That's gigs and gigs worth of samples all at once. It's kind of astonishing. Logic even has this little feature called "Freeze" where you can temporarily turn midi tracks into "frozen" audio tracks in order to cut down on the hit your CPU takes running the tracks. The thing is, while that was an issue last year with my G4, this year I have a G5 and have never once needed to use that feature, despite putting Logic through some really heavy-duty paces.

But, even further still I started to think "well, if it's impacting me and my world like this, think of what it's doing for science." I mean, I'd bet we're not far from being able to fit then entire human genome project on a keyring flash drive. Or being able to actually synthesize convincing impromptu human thought.

And that's the inherent problem with trying to foresee the future. Technology has this weird rate of advancement where we think it'll be much further along than it ever is (flying cars) and yet also underestimate issues like computing power and memory capacity. I guess it's the continual surprise of seeing just how wrong we are that keeps science interesting.

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