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How can everything be captured in simple data like people's exact voice noise? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If a recording of someones very rare voice is representable by mp4 or whatever, could monkeys typing out code randomly exactly reproduce their exact timbre+tone+overall sound?

I don't get how we can get rocks to think + exactly transcribe reality in the ways they do!

Edit: I don't get how audio can be fossilized/reified into plaintext

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate the interest in doing all the math, and I am also not specifically familiar with audio or the audio library, but I believe you could use a similar argument against the OG library of babel, and I happen to know(confidently believe?) that they don't actually have a stored copy of every individual text file "in the library", rather each page is algorithmically generated and they have proven that the algorithm will generate every possible text.

I'd wager it's the same thing here, they have just written the code to generate a random audio file from a unique input, and proven that for all possible audio files (within some defined constraints, like exactly 15 seconds long), there exists an input to the algorithm which will produce said audio file.

Determining whether or not an algorithm with infrastructure backing it counts as a library is an exercise left to the reader, I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

The claim was it "contains every 15 seconds audio recording you can imagine. Every single one.". Which is bullshit, that's like saying this program contains every single literally work:

import sys

print(sys.argv[1])

It's just adding a layer of encoding on top so it feels less bullshity, something like:

def decode(number: int):
  out = ""
  while number:
    number, letter_index = divmod(number, len(string.printable))
    out += string.printable[letter_index]
  return out

That also does not contain every possible (ASCII) book, it can decode any number into a text, and some numbers happen to contain texts that are readable.