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The MP3 serves as a medium for audio files to be compressed and more easily distributed. The MP3 is what makes streaming services like Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music possible. These streaming services don’t actually hold unlimited amounts of space for the audio data files, the files have to be efficient enough to be held and transported throughout the cloud. These services are useful for consumers because it allows us to be able to have access to our music files without having to physically store them on our devices. The consumption of music is a booming industry. It has become so central to almost every aspect of our lives. We can’t even imagine our phones without having the music app down at the bottom.

The MP3 was designed to maximize the portability of audio files, but unintentionally the MP3 has revolutionized the music industry. Artists are no longer selling physical albums and records like they use to. Everything these days is about how many times their songs get streamed or how many times it get viewed or listened to on YouTube. But one artist in particular is fighting the streaming industry. Pop singer Taylor Swift has removed her music from the Spotify platform. She states that the service devalues her music; she believes consumers should pay appropriately for her music. So while listening to music and access to music may be getting easier for consumers, some artists fell as though their sales are being hurt because of such streaming services. How do we decide what’s more important? Access and portability? Or artist profit? But with these advances in technology there are new ways for musicians like Taylor Swift to be profitable. While physical albums may not be as central as they use to be, advances in technology have offered social media as tools for increasing profit for entertainers.

 

Posted from Course Blogs by Shayla B.

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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.

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For the majority of millennials that grew up, MP3s were part of what made their days memorable. This audio file was a form of social connection between friends, an asset for parties, and a cure to bust boredom. It was a celebration of the noises, pitches, and voices that we as humans could connect to form the melodies which shaped the memories of our lives. According to scholar Jonathan Sterne, the MP3 “is an artifact that ‘works for’ and is ‘worked on’ by a host of people, ideologies, technologies and other social and material elements”. Unfortunately, questions surrounding the ethics of the convenience have been around for a great time now .  

The MP3 was made to compress sound files in a way to make them as small as possible without a significant loss in quality. This success allowed the massive sharing of these files on sites like Napster. Music lovers pounced, especially college students. However, the easy and free access to all of these songs allowed for some major problems. After all of the profit made by record stores, was it even “fair” for consumers to download Napster songs to their computers for free? The debate got to the courts, and in the summer of 2001, the ruling resulted in the complete shutdown of the service. This documentary explains the peculiar rise and fall of Napster. 

 

When we flash forward to 2017, we have multiple new “Napsters” that allow for free music listening.  A prominent example is YouTube.  People have developed apps and websites for ripping YouTube videos and creating MP3s to listen to any song on the immense website for $0.

From evidence like this article explaining the taking down of one of the more popular “Youtube to MP3” sites, we see that the industry is continuing to crack down on naughty services like this one. However, with the amount of other sites still like this on the Internet, including other online opportunities to listen to music for free, I doubt there will ever be a day where one could not be allowed to access any free online MP3s. Despite a volatile history, the MP3 remains the revolutionary file type of what was, and still is, an expressive tool to connect our passions and memories through our favorite sounds and songs.

 

Sources:

 

“Napster Documentary: Culture of Free | Retro Report | The New York Times.” YouTube, Google, 8 Dec. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKrdsGdLVQ8.

Sterne, Jonathan. “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media and Society, vol. 8, no. 5, 2006, pp. 825–842. SAGE Publications, journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444806067737.

“YouTube to MP3 Ripping Site Taken down by Music Labels.” What Hi-Fi?, Haymarket Media Group, 8 Sept. 2017, www.whathifi.com/news/youtube-to-mp3-ripping-site-taken-down-music-labels.

 

Posted from My blog by Wes K.

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1. Sports GIF

Example:

Counter-example:

Analysis:

For the sports GIF category, I chose a GIF that could also be classified as a fail GIF for the example. This GIF shows what is usually a very routine action being completely messed up, as the field goal holder doesn’t recognize the ball has been snapped until it hits him in the face mask. Because of how easy this action usually is, the fact that the play was messed up so badly is humorous. The counter-example shows exactly the opposite; a very routine play is completed easily, as the punter catches the snap and smoothly kicks it away. Unlike the original example, this counter-example has next to no comedic value, as a punter punting a well-snapped football is a relatively boring event. The counter-GIF I chose would never be successful as a GIF because of its lack of excitement and humor, which most sports GIF have.

2. Reaction GIF

Example:

Counter-example:

Analysis:

My example and counter-example for the reaction GIF category show a clear distinction between a GIF with an intense reaction and a GIF with no reaction at all. The example GIF that I chose shows a girl flailing around on the ground clearly very upset about something. This GIF is popular because people can relate to the emotions displayed within it. The counter-example that I chose shows the exact opposite of a reaction. Newton’s cradle is a device that shows reactions perfectly, as it is a visualization of the conservation of momentum. In my GIF, I cut off the video just as the reaction from the balls striking one another is about to occur. This is a great counter-example because everyone knows what would happen if the video were to continue, but because of the editing, no reaction is visible.

3. Fandom GIF

Example:

 

Counter-example:

Analysis:

Most examples of fandom GIFs show iconic scenes from various television shows or movies that fans would recognize. They also often contain a quotation at the bottom of the GIF, which is similarly usually a memorable line from the show or movie. The GIF that I chose from Narcos shows a scene that many fans would recognize from Season 1 of the show with a line that Pablo Escobar and other characters use consistently throughout the show. My counter-example shows an example of a scene from a show that would never be used as a fandom GIF. While, in actuality, I did not get the GIF from a television show, the car driving down the road could have come from many scenes in many shows or videos. It has no ties to anything specific, so this clearly would be quite the opposite of a fandom GIF because no one would be able to see it and recognize from where it came.

 

Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.

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Reaction GIF

 

Reaction GIFs are looped videos of an emotional response to something vague and therefor can be applied to various contexts. The most popular reaction GIFs exhibit some form of extreme emotion. The first image is a good example of a useful reaction GIF because it’s displaying a clear emotion, shock. This is juxtaposed by the second GIF because the woman in the GIF isn’t exhibiting any useful emotion that will likely be applied to an online context, therefor making it a counter GIF. The counter GIF fades in from a black screen, making viewers anticipate some form of emotion, but instead they are presented with a blank stare and fades back to black.

 

Sports GIF

 

Sports GIFs are about building up anticipation and seeing a heightened action follow. Sports GIFs usually take memorable sports moments and preserve them so that can be watched and rewatched. The above example shows Kyrie and DeAndre teaming up to complete a high energy duo-dunk. While the second example showcases Lebron seemingly going in for a dunk but then the scene gets cut off. The second GIF is a counter to sports GIFs because it does not showcase any memorable moment. We are lured in by what seems to be a great moment but are let down when the GIF restarts.

 

Fandom GIF

 

 

Fandom GIFs are representations of iconic moments in films and television. They are a single action that represents an entire scene, but most importantly they are meaningful scenes for fans.The first GIF is an iconic scene from the Harry Potter franchise with two main characters present in the scene. From the second-long clip you can tell what number movie in the franchise its from and what are the moments around that one action, leading up to the scene and following it. While in the second GIF you don’t see any of the protagonists and may not remember the events surrounding that particular moment. Without the tag saying that it is a scene from Harry Potter a fan may not even be able to pick that out, thus making it a counter fandom GIF.

Posted from Course Blogs by Shayla B.

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Reaction GIF

My Reaction Counter-GIF:

 

What we see in reaction GIFs are clips of people, animals, or cartoon characters showing an emotional expression.  They may be  jumping up and down, crying, or clapping with their mouth open. But a clip of a random woman walking with her back to the camera shows no explicit reaction at all, and is the perfect example of a counter-GIF. We really don’t know how she is feeling just by seeing the back of the person.  We can only see genuine reactions well by looking at the person’s facial expression. The girl could be excited about getting away from a place she did not like, or she could be upset that she was recently dumped by her boyfriend. This clip can evoke emotions on the broadest range, thus this contradicts what we see in most reaction GIFS.

Sports GIF

 

My Sports Counter-GIF

The job of a sports GIF is either to share an incredible play or laugh about an epic fail that happened in a game. However, many more moments in games are not amazing plays nor are they “so awful it’s funny” instances. So, a counter-GIF of the most average sporting performance in a game is the complete opposite of what people choose to share, just because it happens all the time and is not out of the ordinary. An example of a pitcher throwing to first base to unsuccessfully pick off a runner happens many times in a baseball game, and is  known for being very uneventful, which opposes what we usually see in popular sports GIFs.

Fandom GIF

My Fandom Counter-GIF

The Fandom GIF uses the power of popular culture to highlight scenes in (mostly) movies with a large cult following. Only the very best scenes from the movie are chosen. Normally, they are the ones that are either the most memorable or comical and “stick with” the fans, thus fitting the “fandom” name, like the above scene in Star Wars. But what about the other scenes in movies  that fans do not commit to memory? These, boring, average scenes would be  examples of  Fandom counter-GIFs. Take a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s famous flick The Birds. Search the film on a site like Giphy and you will see clips of the most famous scenes, like the mass of people running away from the flock of birds. But the few seconds of the schoolteacher walking away from the building to the bench was clipped “in between” more important scenes and was not at all memorable, which makes those few seconds a prime counter-GIF.

 

Posted from My blog by Wes K.