Emilie Hurst April 3rd, 2014 MUSI 5004 Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Jonathan Stern - Professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University - BA, University of Minnesota (Humanities); AM, University of Illinois (Speech Communication); PhD, University of Illinois (communication) - Research interests: sounds and music, communication technologies, contemporary cultural studies - Author of The Audible Past: Origins of Sound Reproduction

Goes back a hundred years to recounts the history of the mp3 format. Attempts to move away from teleological narratives of media formats that emphasize high fidelity, by drawing attention to MP3 as a product of compression. Other themes include the relationship between sound, silence, sense and noise; recorded sound as commodity; piracy; influence of government standards. Key Terms: Perceptual coding: audio coding method which exploits the limitations of the human ear in order to reduce data size. Prioritizes frequencies which the ear is most sensitize to and filters out tones that are deemed inaudible because of masking. Masking: when a tone is rendered inaudible by another tone Critical Band: frequencies within which a secondary tone will interfere with the perception of a first tone Key points: Perceptual coding emerged at the intersection of ideas about sound, voice, hearing, signal and noise. (94) Perceptual coding made possible by 1. Work to overcome the subjectivity of the listener 2. Increasing computer power and use of computer as part of sound media, rather than simply modeling 3. Domestication of noise noise shifts from being an annoyance to something that can be productively Research on masking and critical bands o 1876 Alfred M Mayer: describes phenomenon of masking, using technologically produced sounds o 1924 R. L. Wegel and C. E. Lane at Bell labs: looked to quantify masking; masking more pronounced at high volumes and when similar in pitch

o Harvey Fletcher: uses masking to explain effects of ambient noise on intelligibility; theorizes critical bands (1940) o Hearing as a process, spatialized; ear as an imperfect medium; o 1960s: critical bands redefined as critical ratios; defined as the frequencies modified by the filtering action of the inner ear. (100) o 1967 Eberhard Zwicker and Richard Feldtkeller: distinction between stimulus quantities (measurable properties of sound) and sensation quantities (perception of sound); attempts to describe perception of scientifically Absolute threshold (when sound becomes audible or inaudible); masked threshold (when a sound is no longer masked by other sounds) Shift from Mechanical mouth to Digital Ear o 1939 Homer Dudley: invention of vocoders, which produce synthesized speech; looks to imitate mechanism of speech o Manfred Shroeder: developed adaptive predictive coding; introduce error and variation in speech o Joseph Hall: computerized model of cochlea o 1972 Rhona Hellman: researched how sound masked noise o 1979 Shroeder, Atal and Hall: noise should be made inaudible instead of reduced o Michael A. Krasner: attempts to map out a coding scheme that would exploits the limitations of the ear Computers as Audio Technologies o Growth in computing power o Shift of computer from analytic tools to modeling devices Domestication of noise o Masking of noise with music (since 1915) o 1958 J. C. R. Licklider: using noise as an audio analgesia o Leslie Doelle: Environemental Acoustics (1972); using noise in office spaces to manage other sounds Decompositionism: Sound Reproduction after Noise o Jacques Attali: Bruits: Essai sur lconomie politique de la music (1977); Music as order; noise as a threat to order, but also a force for change. (122) o Sound reproduction now privileged imperfect communications systems o Noise used as creative expression: digital audio; sound art; sampling ect. o Decompositionism: the new malleability of sound and noise across cultural domains that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (126) Questions: Does noise still have the potential to be viewed as transgressive? Why has the MP3 become so popular? What are some other technologies that helped its widespread adoption? What does the MP3 say about us, as consumers? Conversely, where is the appeal of loseless file formats?