Music and technology

Music has always been a great source of entertainment for people. Music relaxes and reinvigorates the mind. Music has also been used by psychologists to cure patients. Now 140 years ago people can only hear music only when some talented singers and musicians played it. It was all live performance for there was no way in which we can store the music at that time. 

Now music is nothing but rhythmic sound. Sound is a set of waves in air or in other words sound is disturbances in air that are propagated as waves. In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison made the first mechanical device that store and reproduce sound , this device was called the "Phonograph" which later came to be known as the "Gramophone".

Edison with his Phonograph

It was the first device of its kind in the history of humanity. Edison's phonograph could record sound on a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder and it could later play the sound as well. The phonograph comprised of a stylus the circuit around the stylus was arranged with magnets . So when the sound was recorded the corresponding sound waves was converted into physical movements of the stylus that would etch out the corresponding disturbances on the tinfoil sheet.

When the tinfoil sheet was used to play the sound the movement of the stylus would generate electrical pulses which would be amplified and corresponding sound were generated. Later on many scientists worked on this phonograph and kept improving it. The cylinder was ultimately replaced with flat vinyl disk. Very soon they became the major source of storing music and playing music for many decades till audio cassettes and tape recorders took over in the late 1970s.

The advent of audio cassettes reduced the use of vinyl Cd's and gramophone significantly. In case of audio tapes, there was a tape with magnetic material in the cassettes that contained the audio information in terms of analogue magnetic information. It can be written and rewritten multiple times.

The read head of the tape recorder worked on the principle of electromagnetic induction. When a particular portion of the tape passed under the read-write head it would generate electrical signals that would be amplified and the vibration of the speaker would generate corresponding sound waves in air and thus we heard music and sound. 

When recording sound using a tape recorder, the portion of the magnetic tape that passed through the read-write head would have its tiny magnets rearranged depending on the electrical signals. Tape recorders were a rage in the late 70s ,80s and early 90s. 

Audio Cassete

Tape Recorder and Player

Japanese electronics company named Sony brought the Walkman which made it possible for people to listen to recorded music on the go. The Walkman was a small tape recorder with earphones that the user placed in his ears to listen music. 

Sony Walkman

Now tape recorders used analogue recording technology and developments in computer science and technology were making digital electronics popular. So in the 90s there came speakers that can be connected to a computer to play music. The music was stored in the computer as digital information in the form of 0s and 1s , the sound card that was placed on the mother board would generate electrical signals corresponding to the digital information and the speaker would convert this electrical signals into vibrations that would produce sound in air.

Computer Speakers

                                     
          
The quality of sound(music) with digital technology turned out to be far superior than the analogue sound. However there was one drawback back then the encoding formats of digital music did not have algorithms that compressed it significantly so the music files were huge for those times. 

But in time new formats came in , the mp3 format was a revolution because this technology actually eliminated those sounds that were not heard by humans form the music files, thus making the music files smaller and at the same time the storage technology was improving by leaps and bounds, it was actually doubling every two years.

So storing music became cheaper and easier and with the advent of Internet one was simply able to download music from the Internet anytime, anywhere he or she wanted to. 

Then came those little Mp3 players that stored and played music. Apple Computers saw opportunity in this field and came out with their iconic product i-Pod that made it possible to download , store and play music anywhere and anytime. The quality of music in i-Pod was very rich and the marketing done by Steve Jobs in popularising this product made it a rage in the entire world. 

iPod

                                  

At the same time mobile phones were getting better and better and then you had mobile phones that can actually play music. Today there is not a single mobile phone sold in the world that does not have this feature of playing mp3 music. Mobile phones have become major source of not only communication but also entertainment and information. 

Mobile phone with earphone

                                       


Most of the songs downloaded form the Internet is downloaded in some mobile device. Today we have come to a point where anyone can connect his mobile phone to the Internet and the download music and play it anywhere he/she wants to and it doesn't cost any money at all. Most of the music downloads that are done world wide are done free of cost. 

So science and technology has played a big role in the way in which we used to hear music and sound. Today for  99.9% of music heard by a person would be recorded music. Live music is only heard in a music concert or if you have any singer in your family or in your neighbourhood.

Thanks to technology people have more access to quality music than they ever had in the history of mankind. It is knowledge of sound, materials , electronics etc and corresponding developments in technology that has made this possible. 

Aliens exist for sure

In our own galaxy and in galaxies around the universe there are at least billions of planets with earth like conditions. Thereby it is strongly possible that life may exist on those planets, in fact it is possible that intelligent life - beings and creatures far more intelligent than us and more advanced than us maybe there.

Why maybe, they are surely there. To say that life exists only on earth and nowhere else in the universe is probably the stupidest statement a man can ever make.

If you say that life doesn't exist on other planets because in our 60 years of investigations we have not found any concrete example is like taking a small cup of water from the ocean and then saying that there are no fishes in it.

Intelligent life is surely there in the universe other than the earth, we just have to find them. It is very much possible that they know about our existence, they may have advanced technologies that helps them monitor us.

In mythologies across the world there is a mention of beings with insurmountable powers. Who were these beings and where did they come from? There is mention of Gods like Shiva and Hercules in Indian and Greek mythologies.

In the ancient Indian epic Ramayana there is mention of wingless , soundless plane Pushpak which probably worked on the principle of anti gravity.It is very much possible that the Gods that we talk about in ancient mythologies were nothing but other worldly beings that visited and interacted with us.

In both Ramayana and Mahabharata there is mention of warfare that involved use of weapons that looked like simple bows and arrows, they would throw out lightning and thunder and other powers of nature. There is mention on some kinds of arrows that would generate snakes.

A mythical arrow/weapon called the Brahmhastra is mentioned in this texts that was capable of destroying anything that came in its path. Now these may have been some advanced alien technologies that were misinterpreted by the ancient man as bows and arrows with some power.

The ancient texts says that some mantras(words with spiritual powers) gave the weapons this powers but there is not a single example of this happening anywhere in the world.

In Ramayana there is mention of a unique species who were highly intelligent and powerful monkey like creatures. One of them Hanuman who was capable of increasing and decreasing the size of his body and fly in air.

On one occasion Hanuman has to fly from Sri Lanka to the Himalayas to get an herb(Sanjeevani buti) to cure badly injured Laxman. Now what made this flight possible. Was Ramayana a mere figment of imagination or  was it based on certain facts that the ancient humans saw? Also what were this highly powerful monkey like creatures? Were they a cross between some advanced alien species and monkeys found on earth?

Many people dismiss the concept of extraterrestial life as pseudo-science, a mere figment of imagination. But if we can exist on earth, why can't there be life on other planets in the universe. 

Maybe intelligent life could have come into existence on those planets thousands or millions of years before it came into existence on earth. Consider the technological advances of humans in the last 300 years, on the basis of that one can easily say that humans can achieve such great things  in a million years that cannot even be imagined at this point of time.

 Maybe some advanced alien races are there who are at such high state of technological advancement. 

Investigating Life(UNIVERSE and Earth) - 1

Lets go back in time say about 300 years ago in 1714. Till now you don't have electricity, hardly any machinery, steam engine is not there and the fastest mode of transport that you have is the horse. For cooking you depend on wood. A person has no chance to communicate instantaneously with a person who is more than 200 meters away. 

 Now imagine a person from that time suddenly falls into a space time wormhole and comes to the year 2014 and what does he see cars, roads , lights , planes and he sees people being able to communicate with anyone who is located anywhere in the world or even in space. Flying was considered impossible for humans in his time but humans not only flew like birds but flew way better than birds . So much better that they crossed the boundaries of the atmosphere and even crossed the boundaries of earth's gravitation. The person would be astounded to see how much development humans have made in science and technology in a short period of 300 years.

Now imagine an alien race that was at our stage of evolution a million years ago , if in 300 years there can be so much development how much more development can be achieved in a period of a million years. The results ca be unthinkable. We may find stuff that would be way beyond our imagination. 

Now consider this NASA's Kepler mission observes planets around 125000 that have earth like conditions. Can similarly a highly advanced alien race be keeping a strong watch over us. They maybe observing us at the moment they may know what I and you are talking about. They may even have the power to influence you and me . Maybe their technology is so developed that they can take form of any human being and talk to others. 

Some of them may have already visited the earth by making a show of having being born from a human mother. They might have taught us , they might have been with us and some of them may even be reading this article as I type it down. 

The ancient man when he saw people with such very highly advanced technologies might have mistaken him to be the creator and might have called him God. So it is very much possible that what we call god , the different avataars like Shiva,Vishnu, Krishna, Ram, Mohommad, Jesus and all other gods from various cultures across the globe are no one else but this highly advanced creatures who came to influence and help in our development and evolution.

What was technology back then would have been interpreted as a miracle. For example :- The Chakra of Krishna or the Bramhastra of Bramha were highly advanced weapons capable of controlled destruction on a large scale , the technology was so advanced that the ancient man simply interpreted it as miracle or magic. They called it divine. 

This alien species might have had technology to read the thoughts of people. Already scientists today are working on technology to read thoughts but it is possible that our advanced alien race might have perfected this technology hundreds and thousands of years ago. When people were told about their thoughts they regarded this ancient aliens as gods. They called him the almighty capable of doing anything and everything and started worshipping him as gods created temples, churches, stupas , mosques etc.

Considering the universe as we know it alien life is a possiblity and it is also possible that such advanced aliens may exist or might have existed earlier. As compared to the Universe the earth by size is infinitesimally small entity.