Today, there are more mp3s in circulation than all other recording formats combined. This alone would be cause to write a book about them, but I became fascinated with mp3s because of how they are made. An mp3 encoder uses a mathematical model of the gaps and absences in human hearing to remove some of the data in an audio file, in order to make it smaller. If the encoder “thinks” you won’t hear part of a sound recording, it yanks it out on the encoding end, so that the resulting mp3 file is smaller, and therefore easier to transmit over data lines or to stockpile on hard drives and flash memories.
I wanted to know where this model of human hearing came from and what it could tell us about our contemporary sonic culture. The result is my new book, MP3:The Meaning of a Format.
The technology behind the mp3 is called “perceptual coding,” and I quickly discovered it has deep connections to the development of hearing science and telecommunications over the last hundred years. Everything we think we know about hearing in the state of nature is a result of the interactions between ears and media in the 20th century.
MP3s also point to the importance of compression in the development of communication technologies. Each generation of new media is usually sold to consumers as being of higher definition and greater verisimilitude than its predecessor (think of how DVDs and Blu-Ray have been marketed, for instance). But developments in compression and lower-definition transmission are equally important for everything from telegraphs, to telephones, to color television, to satellite transmission to the internet. This other history is less apparent because it is manifest inside our hard drives, and inside the massive infrastructures that allow us to move data around. It is not as shiny or sexy as the latest consumer gadget, but it could well be more important for everything from aesthetics to policy.
You have probably heard about mp3s for other reasons. Because of their role in file sharing, they are at the center of one of the defining debates of our time: the debate over intellectual property and the future of cultural industries. Because of how they work, and how some mp3s sound, they are also often invoked in debates around the importance of sound quality. My book covers those stories as well, but it places them in a much bigger context, as part of a 100-year history of compression and the management of perception.
Learn About MP3s:
You can read the intro to my book here.
In many cases, it’s hard to hear the difference between an mp3 and a CD-quality file. But if you encode something as an mp3 and then run it through an encoder again, it gets easier. So I made this cover of Alvin Lucier’s famous “sitting in a room” to prove the point. You can skip around—no need to listen to the whole thing. The link includes commentaries on others who have covered Lucier.
There are many online histories and chronologies of the development of mp3s. Here’s one particularly readable and accessible “official” chronology of mp3 history.
If you’re interested in the technical details, the British recording magazine Sound on Sound had a nice explanation back in 2000, just as mp3s were becoming the default standard for sharing audio.
There are a lot of myths in circulation about why certain audio standards turn out the way they do. For instance, there’s a story that CDs are 74 minutes long because of the length of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But that’s not exactly true. As inventor Kees Immink explains, the reasons for a technical standard have a lot more to do with industrial imperatives, like working with other equipment.
Suzanne Vega’s "Tom’s Diner" was one of the test recordings frequently used in the development of the mp3 format. In this essay she offers a rare opportunity to hear the story of audio standards from the artist’s perspective.
Finally, if you’re wondering about the actual impact mp3s have had on global music sales, good luck. It is almost impossible to know for sure because there are so many variables (we can’t even accurately count the number of mp3s in circulation). But total music sales have been eroding for over a decade. Here are some global music industry statistics for 2011.
Here is a very interesting report on media piracy in emerging economies, which gives a different perspective on it.
Although mp3s are shared, mp3 is not an open standard, which means that if you build software or hardware that uses it, you have to pay royalties. Learn more about how money is made from the mp3 standard, and who’s paying, by visiting the official licensing website.
Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012).
Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
Tune in to hear Jonathan Sterne interviewed on Radio Free Culture on WFMU, Monday July 30th, 6-7pm. Subscribe to the Radio Free Culture podcast or check out the archives.
This series is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Is the music experience truly limited to what we can hear? Or do the inaudible elements also contribute to the experience of listening to music? I really question the philosophy behind limiting audio recordings to the dynamic range of our ears when there is additional experience to be had in all the inaudible vibrations and artifacts that different grades and sizes of audio equipment can produce.
Posted by: Andrew Waterloo | July 25, 2012 at 12:50 PM
Jonathan Sterne is awesome... His "Audible Past" book is a great read, not only for the gory details of early recording history such as the ear phonautograph which actually involved a dead man's ear!
Posted by: Woody | July 25, 2012 at 06:04 PM
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Is there an ebook version? :-) Sorry, i couldn't resist asking. Regarding your iterated mp3 adaptation of Alvin Lucier, "I Am Sitting In a Room, Compressing", have you heard Francisco Lopez's _Paris Hiss_ cassette? It's iterations of normal bias tape hiss.
Posted by: endwar | July 29, 2012 at 12:58 AM
Jonathan Sterne is an incredible thinker, and I've been waiting to read this since I heard him present an overview in 2010... Very excited to have these ideas out in public!
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