re: the origins of MP3:
ecompany.com
"Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter"
[You may want to bookmark and register yourself at ecompany.com ; Ecompany Now, which is the print title (the web version url is simply ecompany.com) is a new Time Inc. publication which is put out monthly in print, and daily on the Web. It contains highly relevant information, IMO, for folks getting into, or attempting to stay on top of, the new Internet business model. The June 2000 issue was its first, and one can easily tell that the Time Inc influence has allowed it to launch very nicely. Also, one comes to realize that being an AOLer will have its perks: The online 'Net chat with Schwabb's CEO that took place last week allowed only AOL subscribers to participate. Get the link?]
Enjoy, FAC
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"Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter"
By: Hilmar Schmundt
Issue: June 2000
The MP3 format is a product of Suzanne Vega's voice and this man's
ears.
Bavaria's best-known music export features neither yodeling nor the shrieking of fat ladies in
helmets. It's not even something you can hear: It's the sound-compression algorithm ISO
MPEG-Audio, Layer-3, better known as MP3. While the format has become ubiquitous and
pirated MP3 files have terrorized the record industry (particularly since the creation of Napster,
which facilitates the downloading of files), few people are aware of its Teutonic origins. MP3
was born at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, in the town of Erlangen; its
father was a professor named Karlheinz Brandenburg. In an age when it is possible to become a
multimillionaire on the strength of a half-baked idea, Brandenburg has done the unthinkable: He
has failed to reap either wealth or publicity from his role in the creation of a staggeringly
successful technology. And, even more remarkable, he feels pretty good about it.
Brandenburg's study of music compression began before Napster creator Shawn Fanning was
even born. In 1980, Brandenburg -then a 26-year-old student researcher- joined a newly
assembled team of scientists working on the compression of music files. Brandenburg soon
wrote his dissertation on the subject and rose to become the head of the music-compression
project. By 1988 the team had built a refrigerator-size machine that could reduce a sound file
to 8 percent of its original size. The system required eight powerful fans just to keep it from
overheating; Brandenburg's team nicknamed it "the helicopter," he says, because "we were
always joking that the fans would someday make it take off."
Given that people didn't actually want helicopters in their homes, Brandenburg and his team
members dedicated themselves to replicating its effects through an algorithm. As a result of
their efforts, MP3 fools the ear by eliminating the least essential parts of a music file. For
example, if two notes are very similar, or if a high and low tone occur at exactly the same time,
the brain perceives only one of them; the MP3 algorithm selects the more important signal and
discards the other. To create MP3, Brandenburg had to appreciate how the human ear
perceives sound. A key assist in this effort came from folk singer Suzanne Vega. "I was ready to
fine-tune my compression algorithm," Brandenburg recalls. "Somewhere down the corridor a
radio was playing [Vega's song] 'Tom's Diner.' I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly
impossible to compress this warm a capella voice."
Because the song depends on very subtle nuances of Vega's inflection, the algorithm would
have to be very, very good to select the most important parts of the sound file and discard the
rest. So Brandenburg tested each refinement of his system with "Tom's Diner." He wound up
listening to the song thousands of times, and the result was a code that was heard around the
world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is
replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.
Although the Fraunhofer Institute has received millions of dollars in licensing fees from its
patents on the MP3 algorithms, Brandenburg has seen only a tiny portion of the revenues. The
same will be true for his team's next invention, MP4, a more secure version of MP3. But he
doesn't seem especially concerned, since the institute has rewarded him in a way that more
befits a man of science: It has given him the opportunity to do even more research. The
German government, Brandenburg boasts, has done him the "great honor" of asking him to
found a new Fraunhofer Institute that will specialize in audio research. "Maybe I didn't become
rich and famous," he says, "but I'm not the typical starving inventor." |
