LAST WEEK, Sweden's Propellerhead Software released a new program called Reason, billed as an "infinitely expandable music system." Like many audio recording packages, Reason is as much a framework for future software as it is a set of tools -- though the initial group of tools that comes bundled with Reason are extensive enough, and include most of the basic building blocks of digital audio recording. There's a drum machine for laying down rhythm tracks, a sampler for triggering sound files from a keyboard, a number of units for adding effects like distortion or reverb to each track, a sequencer for recording and playing back entire songs, and a mixer for adjusting the levels. From that description, Reason sounds like a number of audio packages on the market right now, give or take a module or two. The real difference lies not in the functionality, but in what the software actually looks like on the screen.

What it looks like, in almost excruciating detail, turns out to be the sort of audio rack you'll see beside a keyboard player at a live show, or lining the walls of a recording studio: layers and layers of horizontal units, gleaming with LED readouts and pulsing lights, stacked one atop another. Manual dials and switches and sliders abound. (If Flash Gordon had a home studio, it would look something like Reason.) Reason's designers have even gone to the extent of including screws at the edges of the screen, reproducing the real-world screws that hold actual audio racks together. If you dedicate a module to a specific task (say, applying the reverb effect to the drum module), the software will display a little fake piece of tape with the fake handwritten words "Drum Reverb" on the effects module -- the way an actual roadie would do for a touring rock band.
Viewed on a large, high-quality screen, Reason is a spectacular piece of software. All those glittering diodes and 3-D knobs create far more eye candy than comparably powerful programs like Photoshop or Premiere. (Not surprisingly, of course: Visual artists don't like the distraction of overwrought interfaces.) But for all but the most experienced musicians, Reason's interface is also spectacularly confusing. If you don't know how a traditional rack of audio modules works, you're not going to get very far with Reason. All of which creates an interesting paradox: Propellerhead has drawn on all the visual firepower of the modern digital computer to recreate an interface that predates the icons, windows, and menu bars of modern digital computing. But surely there are better ways to represent what a reverb unit does than a series of LED numbers and enigmatic knobs?
The latest release of the popular Cubase audio recording system, for instance, takes a completely different approach. Since reverb is conventionally used to simulate playing music in different-sized rooms -- the difference between playing drums in a closet and playing in Carnegie Hall -- the Cubase reverb model includes a 3-D cube that grows in size as you adjust the sliders, giving you a clear vision of the acoustic environment you're simulating. That kind of immediate visual feedback would have been impossible with the crude LED displays of eighties-era equipment, much less the analog dials and switches of earlier technology. But it's a relatively straightforward feature for the faster video cards of today's PC.
Are there older, mechanical conventions that are actually worth keeping? The answer is probably yes. While Reason may have gone too far in reproducing the widgets of obsolete technology, the concept of the rack itself -- a series of distinct modules that you can string together into a single unit -- is an immensely useful idea, and one that translates brilliantly to the screen. Why launch another application every time you want to tinker with the drum loop? Why even launch another window? Reason's stacked modules let you fashion a unified audio system without forcing you to flip through menu options to access your core tools.

But Reason's most memorable feature lies on its backside -- oddly enough, given that software programs don't by definition have a "front" and a "back." Press a key and Reason "flips" the view to the back of the audio rack -- to a jungle of virtual cables connecting the various modules. Anyone who has ever maintained a music studio will instantly recognize that bramble of patch cords. Because so much of modern audio technology is about routing signals between different units -- the guitar played through the distortion box, and then EQ'd, and then mixed down with the drums -- the connected signal pathways that go into your average 'N Sync song are about as complicated as the air-traffic-control flight paths for the Northeast Corridor. And it turns out that one of the best ways to represent all those connections looks a lot like the way it looked when you actually had to make those connections yourself, before computers got involved with music production. You attached a cable from one unit to another. If you wanted to see how your audio system was wired, you walked around to the backside, and checked out the wires. The fact that Reason lets you do the very same thing on a PC screen is a genuine breakthrough, even if it's dressed up in the garments of dead technology.

PERHAPS "DEAD" IS too strong a word. From a certain angle, Reason's return to analog visual interfaces runs parallel to a development in the aural realm. Our ears have gravitated to analog sounds in recent years: the scratches and pops of vinyl records, the bleats and gurgles of early Moog synthesizers, the blurry tape loops of the mellotron. For decades, musicians have rhapsodized about the vintage sound of old Fender tube amplifiers and original Les Paul guitars, but the return to the crude sounds of first-generation synthesizers constitutes a more dramatic reversal. After all, a contemporary electric guitar is fundamentally the same instrument that Les Paul wired up a half-century ago, while synthesizers have experienced tremendous technological advances in just a few decades. The first generation of synths were only a few steps up from the sound quality of your average Touch Tone phone, and most were incapable of playing more than four notes at a time. Today's synths can play dozens, if not hundreds, of simultaneous notes, and can recreate the sounds of symphonies and sitars with an astonishing realism. When those first generation machines arrived on the scene, they sounded starkly mechanical next to traditional instruments -- and yet thirty years later, musicians wax nostalgic about the "warm" sound of the analog synth.
And so it has come to pass that the extraordinary computational power of modern audio software has been harnessed to model and reproduce those early analog synthesizers. The shapeshifting of digital code has enabled the latest music programs to faithfully reproduce the sounds of those first-generation Moogs and mellotrons -- and not surprisingly, the graphic interfaces that accompany these programs are themselves artful reproductions of the original control panels built into the real machines. They don't go quite as far as the Reason interface, for the most part, but the appetite for analog clearly embraces both sound and vision.
The funny thing about that aural fixation is that it tends to home in on certain specific kinds of noise. What we call "warmth" in a sound often turns out to be a subtle type of noise built into the medium that conveys it -- an overdriven Fender amp, a saturated analog tape, the scratches of a vinyl record. What makes the sound warm is a mix of distortion and familiarity: The older medium makes the sound less pure, the signal less clean, but it does so in a familiar way, in a way our ears have grown accustomed to. And it turns out that those distortions, too, can be modeled and reproduced by the latest generation of digital software. Cubase comes with a plug-in called "Grungelizer," which lays down a hushed ambient effect of vinyl crackles and the background hum of AC power, and recreates the mechanical wow and flutter of an old turntable.
More impressively, the top-of-the-line Cubase32 program includes what they call the True Tape technology that mimics the sound of an oversaturated reel-to-reel tape -- a hallmark of predigital recording studios. Oversaturated tape is a little like a distorted guitar sound; it's a way of pushing technology beyond its normal limits in a way that sounds appealing to the ear. Analog recording engineers used to deliberately record sounds at a higher level than the tape device was supposed to be able to handle. The result is, predictably enough, usually described as a "warmer, fuller" sound, though on a purely technical level, it mainly involves the addition of barely audible noise to the mix. That oversaturating approach went out with the first generation of digital recording devices -- recording a digital track too "hot" results in a screeching, dissonant sound that makes your modem sound like Pavarotti. But Cubase's engineers have figured out how to use the extra bandwidth of thirty-two-bit recording to process the digital signal with the tape saturation effect, giving it the warmer grain of recordings from the sixties and seventies.
Is there something genuinely more appealing about those analog sounds? (Or, for that matter, those analog interfaces?) Or do we find them more comforting or more adventurous because they sound so different from the digital sheen of a Britney Spears mix? Given enough practice, the human ear is capable of developing attachments to a bewildering array of sounds. The first overdriven Fender Amp must have sounded like a horrible mistake -- but eventually we came around to it. Could the same thing happen to the artifacts of digital technology? Sound purists like to talk about the grain and the texture of analog-era equipment, but there is grain and texture in the digital world, too -- it just sounds different. In the first few moments of the new Madonna single, "Don't Tell Me," an acoustic guitar riff drops off into silence for a few microseconds at three random points; the effect faithfully reproduces the sound of a streaming audio file fading out momentarily because of Net congestion. I first heard the song over the Web, and had to listen to it several times before I realized that those stuttering loops were deliberate. Only a few years ago, those dropouts would have sounded like a malfunction; now they're just another item in the recording engineer's bag of tricks. And if Madonna is already wise to the grain of digital audio, can Britney be far behind?

Steven Johnson is FEED's editor-in-chief and the author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

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