The point is that at the physical layer you still have a well defined log likelihood test to produce digital information. That's why QAM lasted so long even though it is not power efficient - because it has an analytical likelihood function.
This is the boundary between digital and analog communications. Since he did not use a digital modulation scheme, this would be a form of analog comms
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Why couldn’t you have a likelihood function for the bird?
As a trivial case, you can just say: Does the spectrum look like a bird? Then you’d have a digital channel by your definition for a single bit.
The actual channel bandwidth is obviously higher than that.
socsa@piefed.social 4 days ago
Yes you could likely design an optimized modulation scheme to do this, likely some kind of bird specific frequency shift keying. You can also do any kind of quadrature modulation in the audio spectrum (original dialup used acoustic modems).
This person just didn't do that in this case. It's still a very cool experiment by YouTube maker standards though.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 days ago
My point is that it doesn’t have to be optimal to be considered digital. Which in the general case means basically any communication channel can be digital.
If the argument is that they didn’t correctly calculate the bandwidth, then sure.