Illustration by Molly Butterfoss

It’s 2014, the CD and mp3 are down, and vinyl is still up. Though the old champion format will never recover its dominant role, there's a more general principle at work in its endurance. Rather than a relic—something to be discarded in the face of newer, more efficient technologies—there are aspects of analog that may be precisely what music needs to survive. Analog forms of communication are not merely old but ancient, and they can't be junked like an out-of-date gadget because they are tied to ways we interact with the spatial world, and to one another. Analog means more than “pre-digital.”

In professional audio, for instance, engineers are becoming increasingly precise in identifying aspects of analog that digital, for all its powers of processing and convenience, cannot replace. Some use those observations to refine digital tools; others are returning to seemingly outmoded technologies in order to bring them back into the present. In both cases, they are reinstating the analog alongside the digital. Evidently, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Music has been at the forefront of the assault on analog, and perhaps it can point the way toward its survival as well. Looking at the way we interact with sound can help define a “post-digital analog,” which could solve problems for our digital communications on an even broader scale. And what better place to consider our relationship to analog and digital sound than the two points of audio contact we make with our smartphones all day: through our ears and through our voice.

Though the Sony Walkman brought headphones onto the street as early as 1979, the smartphone stuck them in all of our ears. Digital communications keep us plugged in to another place than the one we are in—whether via phone, internet, or (rather quaintly, at this point) music—and earbuds are the point of contact. Watching director Chantal Akerman’s footage of a filled New York City subway car in 1976, it’s striking how anchored the riders are in their own space. Of course, there were plenty of good reasons for wanting to distance oneself from the hot and noisy subway of the summer of '76 (I remember it well…), but there simply wasn’t the technological means of escape that we all carry with us now. Picture Akerman’s subway car today (you may be on one now): How many riders remain in just a single time and place?

Everyone reading this is familiar with the disconnection from the immediate environment introduced by earbuds or headphones. Legislation is even starting to confront social problems caused by that distance, while driving for example. This spatial and temporal multitasking is not, for me, an ethical issue, but not knowing where you are can indeed be a practical problem.

Perhaps you too have had the experience of following GPS navigation instructions only to find yourself headed in the wrong direction, or even at the wrong address. In retrospect, the mistake is obvious: abandoning all analog clues to your whereabouts—signs, landmarks, the sun, maps, your internal sense of direction—can lead to the entirely wrong place in the physical world. While traveling, your location was digitally mapped at every moment, more precisely than it could ever be using analog information. And yet you never knew where you were heading. The blue dot was always visible, but its destination remained off screen.

Earbuds and headphones have a similar blind spot, aurally speaking. The listener on headphones is forever at the center of the soundspace, like the blue dot on a GPS map. Sounds enter that field from left or right, but they never seem to come from where we are heading: straight ahead. The reason is that, in the analog world, we locate sounds by perceiving difference as they reach each of our ears, much the way we see depth by summing together the perspective from each eye. On headphones, we use our ears simultaneously, but not together—it’s like placing a block between our eyes (lining your hand up in front of your nose is enough to interrupt stereo vision, try it). What’s more, the pure separation of left and right on headphones makes for sound that, according to physicist William M. Hartmann, “seems to be within the listener’s head—it is not perceived to be in the real external world.”

In other words, mapping ourselves via headphones or GPS can lead to disorientation. Without analog clues to guide location, the world becomes an Alice-in-Wonderland-like place where signs pointing north nonetheless lead south, and sounds come from the left or right but never straight ahead.

Returning to Akerman’s subway car, we might say that in the summer of 1976 everyone knew where they were, for better and worse. Today, digital information puts each of us in a different space, even if we are hurtling together through a tunnel on fixed tracks. Crowded into a single car, any of us might be closer, visually and aurally, to somewhere or someone not on the train at all. And Akerman's camera, I bet, would go largely unnoticed, with so many fewer eyes and ears roaming the car.

In audio, one solution to the location problem in headphone listening is “crosstalk”—feeding an altered version of one channel’s sound into the other in order to recreate the kinds of binaural clues we use to locate sounds in space. (I have written elsewhere about an ingenious and inexpensive app that does just this for your iTunes playlist, making it sound like the music is emanating from speakers instead of headphones.) Crosstalk is unavoidable in the analog world, because the pure left/right separation we routinely experience through earbuds can only happen through a highly rarified physical situation... like wearing earbuds. Traditionally, crosstalk has been viewed not as a boon to perception, but as a problem to be solved by engineers in search of greater clarity for signals. Google it, and you’ll find links to issues it causes for telephony, wireless communications, integrated circuits, and, yes, audio. In all these situations, crosstalk is a source of distortion.

Consider the GPS problem again and how it's easily solved by simply opening our eyes to the analog information we had shut out. Yet, like crosstalk between channels, many analog clues to our location can be contradictory or seem to reduce our ability to navigate: signs are confusing, the road looks alternately familiar and strange, the map is vague about the one thing we needed to know from it. Why else do we argue in cars so much?

Crosstalk, distortion, uncertainty, ambiguity… perhaps these are clues to the expressions on the faces of Akerman’s subway riders as well. They look around the car, calculating what they need to know about their confusing surroundings. There’s no digital information to consult (and this being 1976 New York, there are no announcements on the train, either). There’s just a mass of information received by eyes and ears that needs to be evaluated, sorted, discarded—all the things our digital devices do for us more quickly, and in many ways more accurately.

But not in every way. Sorting through these confusions—like mediating between how much sound we are hearing through each ear—is what we do to place ourselves in the analog world. Without digital information, we may not know where our blue dot is, precisely, at any given moment. But grappling with that uncertain analog fuzz may be what gives us a sense of where we are heading.

With the iPhone’s digital sound processing on,

the voice is compressed—what is being said is clear,

but the subtleties of how the message is delivered are lost.

At the other end of the smartphone's headphone jack is the means for audio input: the microphone. Actually, if you have a current iPhone, there are three microphones—in addition to one at the bottom, there’s one at the top front (by your ear), and one around back, by the camera lens. As any audio engineer can tell you, two mics are just fine for stereo recording, and one does the job in mono. So why three on the iPhone, which records in mono regardless?

It’s because these mics are less about capturing existing audio—the analog sounds we hear in the world—and more about processing those sounds as digital data. Among the technologies that the additional mics make possible are noise-cancellation (recording sounds in order to negate them) and “beamforming,” a system for preferential recording from a particular direction. Beamforming is an innovation crucial to the iPhone’s voice recognition program—curiously, it provides Siri with the very same directional abilities that we sacrifice by listening on headphones.

The three mics of the iPhone improve its accuracy by making voices more recognizable via the phone, and (with voice recognition) to the phone. But accuracy is different for a digital device than it is for our ears in an analog space. If you watch Apple VP Phil Schiller present the new and improved audio features for the iPhone 5, part of the pitch is that “the data in your voice…doesn’t sound entirely natural all the time.” That is, the full sound of our voices—the “natural” qualities that we hear when we speak or sing to one another in a room—are not the same as what makes them intelligible. The challenge for Apple’s audio engineers is less about improving sound than deciding whom they are improving it for: you or Siri.

One way to experience that difference is to turn off the digital sound processing applied to the mic on an iPhone. There’s no option for that in Apple’s OS settings, but audio engineers have programmed workarounds. The podcast app bossjock studio includes this option, and its designers have helpfully posted soundfiles with the iPhone’s processing turned on and off for comparison:

With the iPhone’s digital sound processing on, the voice is compressed to a narrow range of volume and frequencies. The result is perfectly intelligible for content—what is being said is very clear—but the subtleties of how the message is delivered are lost. Is the voice loud or soft? Are we being addressed intimately or publicly? Can we hear hints of other meanings in the speaker’s voice, or does his delivery match the words exactly?

Answering any of these questions seems more within reach when listening to the sample without digital processing. Despite the banal test message, it’s possible to form an impression of the speaker: his intonation, his pauses, and his emphasis are all individual quirks that register much better without the limiting and compression applied by digital processing.

When we use a cellphone to communicate, we use Siri’s ears—we listen for intelligibility. But when we use an analog microphone—and even an iPhone without the processing is, like all microphones, an analog device—we use our ears, which are accustomed to the full range of the voice: the parts that make it intelligible, and the parts that don’t. Among the parts that don’t are those that make a voice sound “natural,” as Apple’s VP puts it. An audio engineer might articulate that differently, since there’s no “natural” in the studio, but there are many ways to focus on aspects of the voice: tone, color, harmonics, grain, breath. Indeed, for rock recordings, intelligibility can be way down the list of qualities an engineer chooses to emphasize as she shapes the voice that will ultimately reach our ears. (What does Siri make of Mick Jagger, I wonder?)

Music with unintelligible lyrics is an object lesson in our ability to detect feeling in the voice regardless of language. And microphones are excellent for capturing precisely that—even better than they do words, as anyone who has struggled to record lyrics with plosives and sibilants knows. Great microphone singers like Sinatra maximize the mic’s ability to register minute differences in our voices. Every sigh, every breath, every silence can be felt via mic; digital processing transforms our voice into data that can only be heard.

The flattening of the voice via processing removes affect and, much like headphone listening, our sense of distance. There’s a basic microphone technique known as “proximity effect”: the closer the voice to a mic, the deeper its tone. Cellphone mics are processed to minimize such changes. Much like navigation by GPS, the cellphone always places the speaker in the same non-space: neither near nor far; neither intimate nor distant.

This lack of proximity effect seems emblematic of other digital communications. A tweet, a Facebook post, and an Instagram photo are all addressed equally to those near and far from us, both in terms of space and relationship. Just like on a cellphone, our ability to modulate tone is reduced. Digital space allows for clear communication across great distances, but communicating distance itself becomes a challenge.

If the iPhone’s earbuds leave us unsure of exactly where we are, its mics guarantee that at least it’s the same distance from everywhere else. And just as crosstalk can help solve this locational problem for headphones, it’s the fuzzy non-verbal parts of our voices that establish proximity in our communications. For our ears and our voices—I’ll whisper this so you know I mean it—we need analog to maintain a sense of place. Digital is here to stay. But so is analog, because without it, we’re lost.