Digital vs Analog & the Battle to Save Our Sounds

There’s a rhythm in our bones that no algorithm can replicate.

The griots — our oral historians, musicians, and keepers of memory — once held the keys to identity. With string, drum, and voice, they passed down more than songs. They passed down truths. Names. Warnings. Joy.

But today, much of that is being flattened into data. Streaming platforms value compression over texture. Autotune over breath. Quantity over soul.

I’m not against technology. I use it myself. But I worry that as we digitise everything, we lose the pauses. The imperfections. The vibration of a kora string tuned by hand, not machine.

In Senegal, a griot once told me: “A voice carries different when you sing it to someone’s face.”

That stayed with me.

Now, across Africa and the diaspora, artists are resisting the erasure. They’re returning to traditional instruments, archiving oral histories, remixing old songs not for profit — but to preserve what’s at risk.

It’s not nostalgia. It’s necessity.

Because music isn’t just sound. It’s storage. Of ancestors. Of grief. Of resistance.

And if we let the algorithms decide what’s worth hearing, we risk forgetting what we were always meant to remember.