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“The Father of the MP3” is perhaps more famously known as Karlheinz Brandenburg. He was a part of The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) that worked to standardize data compression schemes, as mentioned in the article for today’s class. I was reading an article featuring an interview with Brandenburg, in which I learned about the mp3’s history of betrayal. The article mentions questions of intellectual property and file-sharing, but this story from Brandenburg shows the relative ease of hacking this format:
In, I think it was ’97, some Australian student bought professional grade — from our point of view — encoding software for MP3 from a small company in Germany. He paid with a stolen credit card number from Taiwan. He looked at the software, found that we had used some Microsoft internal application programming interface … racked everything up into an archive and wired some Swedish side, [and] put that to a U.S. university FTP site together with a read-me file saying, ‘This is freeware thanks to Fraunhofer.’
Another interesting point in the article that was a little easier to conceptualize was the fact that the goal of mp3s were to compress audio files by stripping them of some audio layers, but keeping it at the level that the human ear could not identify the difference. This is where Brandenburg introduces the “Mother of the MP3“, Suzanne Vega.
An acapella version of her song “Tom’s Diner” featured Vega’s voice in the middle of the song with a little bit of ambiance and no other instruments – “a worst case [scenario] for the system as we had it in 1988″ (Brandenburg qtd. by Rose and Ganz). Brandenburg heard the song being played down the hall from his research lab and thought Vega’s voice would be the perfect template to improve the compression of his mp3 algorithm. Vega described Brandenburg’s initial testing results as “monstrous distortions, as though the Exorcist has somehow gotten into the system, shadowing every phrase” (qtd. by MacDonald). Eventually they fixed it so that it sounded like the CD, but the result is that when an mp3 player compresses music by anyone now, it is replicating the way that Brendenburg heard Suzanne Vega.
Similar to how Siri was formed on the audio of Susan Bennett, the interpretation of audio files on the mp3 was shaped around the specific sound of Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner“. I wonder what the effects or correlations this caused, but since we can barely tell audio differences between original tracks and mp3 files, we will probably never know.
Bibliography
MacDonald, John S.W. “Suzanne Vega Is the ‘Mother of the MP3.’” Observer, Observer, 4 Dec. 2014
Rose, Joel, and Jacob Ganz. “The MP3: A History Of Innovation And Betrayal.” NPR, NPR, 23 Mar. 2011
Posted from Intro to Digital Studies by Lauren C.