Science & Tech Quote by Sean Booth

Booth is pulling back the curtain on a dirty little secret of modern music: the “real” thing is never actually present. In digital audio, you don’t capture a sound wave so much as you sample it, slice it into measurable chunks, and rebuild a convincing illusion from math. Calling it “approximations” isn’t a diss; it’s a manifesto. The subtext is anti-romantic and quietly liberating: once you accept that the medium is abstraction, you stop chasing purity and start chasing control.

That’s why his phrasing matters. “The actual sound wave never enters the equation” reads like a shrug, but it’s also a philosophical line in the sand. He’s refusing the audiophile moral hierarchy where analog equals authentic and digital equals cold. Instead, he reframes reduction as power. “Reducing the information to a finite amount” sounds like loss, yet he immediately flips it into possibility: finitude is what makes editing, rearrangement, and transformation feasible at scale. Constraints become the toolset.

Contextually, this sits neatly in the lineage of electronic musicians (Booth’s work with Autechre especially) who treat sound less as performance and more as material science. Digital isn’t just a delivery format; it’s a compositional environment where “sections” can be time-stretched, granulated, quantized, and reassembled into shapes no human hand could reliably play. Booth’s intent is to normalize that trade: you give up the myth of direct capture, and in return you gain a kind of surgical authorship over reality’s raw noise.