Of course, silence does not exist, for us, at least. It is a non-sound that we will never not hear. We are stalked, unceasingly, by white noise, pure ringing tones that our brains will eventually imitate on their own, all other sound muffled by the noiseless snow. Greg Milner explains this phenomenon rather nicely: "We often think of [white noise] as a high-pitched sound, but it's really a sound that contains every frequency audible to human beings; it sounds high to us because every octave contains twice as many frequencies as the one below it" (121). Alarmingly, we are hearing everything all time; not one single frequency will give us a break. Pink noise is simply "white noise that compensates for this imbalance by dropping the volume of each successive octave, so that each has the same energy" (121). In other words, pink noise is white noise that has been compressed, mixed for optimum audibility at every frequency. They don't sound that different, but if someone took all the white noise in the world and replaced it with pink noise, there would surely be complaints by sound nerds everywhere. Though it often successfully pretends otherwise, music is nerdy. Mark Katz touches on the birth of record collecting in Capturing Sound, likening it to an addiction. Really though, record collectors, music enthusiasts, are those who want nothing more than to sift through and pick apart every word, note, and phrase, dissect them, label them, and judge their worth. Igor Stravinsky revealed himself as one such individual in hoping that music technology could "make 'authentic interpretation' possible" (via Braun 16). This is exactly what we are now capable of doing. I can sit down and listen to the digitally remastered CD version of "Strawberry Fields Forever," played through excessively large speakers until I go deaf, or I could play the original issue vinyl on a very good modern turntable to the same end. After I go deaf, I can read Recording the Beatles and know exactly why that weird tape splice so clearly results in a slight pitch drop for the remainder of the song, or exactly which type of Mellotron it was that McCartney used. This is both geeky and detrimental to one's heath, but it is the ultimate expression of authentic interpretation, even though the music is not strictly authentic, which is, in the end, a vague and useless term to apply to music, and possibly why Walter Benjamin chose not to discuss music at length in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Theodor Adorno jumped more willingly into this fray, bemoaning all sorts of atrocities committed under the heading of "music." In a more political moment, he wrote that "'It is not ideology which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond with reality,"" a statement that Milner went ahead and applied to music anyway, rephrasing it thus, "in artistic terms: It is not representations that are untrue but rather their pretension to capture exactly that which they represent'" (119). Perhaps, then, it is only this still-clinging, Edisonian pretension that causes confusion. It might easily be dropped.