What is digital music?

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You've probably heard the word "digital" being used a lot! Some people say we're in the "Digital Age." There's digital television, digital clocks, digital music and many other digital things.  When we say something is digital, we mean that there is a special kind of information involved that can be read by machines like computers.  In digital music, sound has been recorded and then changed into a bunch of numbers and sometimes letters that computers can read and use to make the sound again! It's like a special language for computers! 

Have you heard of MP3s?  These are probably the most common type of digital music today! They are a special type of computer file that contains these numbers and letters that our computers, iPods, and other music players can understand.  When we press the "play" button, the music players tell our speakers and headphones to make certain sounds, and we hear digital music!

CDs or “Compact Discs” are another very common type of digital music.

What’s NOT digital music?

Not all music is digital.  If you listen to a cassette tape or a record, you're listening to "analog" music! In analog music, the sound is not changed into a computer language. When microphones record sound, they act just like an ear and respond to sound’s vibrations. Those vibrations change as the sound changes and a stylus, which is sort of like a pen that doesn’t have any ink, carves a shape of the sound onto the tape or record. As the sounds and vibrations change, the shapes that get written on the tape or record change. Record players and tape players can recognize these shapes, which they play back to us as sound.

Both analog and digital music can play high quality sound, but many people prefer digital music because after a while, analog music can lose quality from being played too much! The numbers and letters that computers read for digital music never change!

Secret Codes

Special languages made of numbers aren't just for computers.  We can also use them to make secret codes!

If you want to write a friend a secret message, you'll need to give them two things: the code that needs to be cracked (figured out!) and a key that helps them do it.

Here's one way you can write a secret message in code:
Write all the letters in the alphabet on a piece of paper.  Next to them, write a number, and make sure that no numbers are repeated. It could be "a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4, e=5, f=6, g=7, h=8, i=9, j=10..." This will be the key to help your friend unlock your secret code!

Next, take a pencil and on a new sheet of paper, write your secret message in letters.  Below each of those letters, write the number that goes with it. If you use the example I gave you above, every time you see the letter A, write a number 1 below it.  When you're done writing all the numbers, erase the letters, so you're only left with numbers.

Now you'll see a bunch of numbers that don't really seem to mean anything, but if you have the key to the code and substitute numbers for letters, you’ll have something: your secret message!

If you see "8 9” and you know "h=8” and “i=9", you know someone has said "Hi" to you!

Computers do the same thing to digital music files! They read the files full of letters and numbers that don't mean much to you and me, but because computers know how to crack the code, they can tell what the files mean. If it's an MP3 file, they can play us the file as music!