Post by Wß on Mar 7, 2015 1:24:43 GMT
Vox: The MP3 format can reduce the file size of a song as much as 10-fold, but in the process something has to be filtered out. Which sounds get filtered out of a song to make the file smaller was determined in 1993 by a group of European sound engineers who using songs like Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," and Vega's "Tom's Diner." In 1994, MP3s became a public format and, after the advent and widespread use of the internet, they are now the primary format that most people listen to music in.
But what happened to those filtered out sounds?
Ryan MaGuire, a a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, created a project called "moDernisT" to find out. McGuire's project pulls out those missing sounds and lets them live on their own. Here is the lost material from "Tom's Diner" as found by MaGuire:
You can hear so many unnecessarily rejected sounds. The buzzing of the small diner, in the first verse for example, and even some of Vega's softer vocal tones in verse 5.
What MaGuire has proved here is that the songs we listen to every single day are not the exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear. Instead, they are slightly stripped versions of their art run through a set of standards created by a bunch of engineers in 1993. For many people, that won't matter. The songs sound almost the same, but the compression of music into an MP3 format is an important question to weigh when considering artistic intent and analyzing songs that aren't exactly the original.
But what happened to those filtered out sounds?
Ryan MaGuire, a a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, created a project called "moDernisT" to find out. McGuire's project pulls out those missing sounds and lets them live on their own. Here is the lost material from "Tom's Diner" as found by MaGuire:
You can hear so many unnecessarily rejected sounds. The buzzing of the small diner, in the first verse for example, and even some of Vega's softer vocal tones in verse 5.
What MaGuire has proved here is that the songs we listen to every single day are not the exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear. Instead, they are slightly stripped versions of their art run through a set of standards created by a bunch of engineers in 1993. For many people, that won't matter. The songs sound almost the same, but the compression of music into an MP3 format is an important question to weigh when considering artistic intent and analyzing songs that aren't exactly the original.