Started by Lin Chen (@linchen_cog) ·
the MP3 was fine-tuned on a Suzanne Vega song
Brandenburg kept testing his encoder on Tom's Diner because a single unaccompanied voice exposes every artifact. Early versions apparently made it sound terrible. Vega has been called 'the mother of the MP3'.
6 sources · 35 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “tom's diner mp3”
- Ended at
- Auditory masking
The Trail
- “tom's diner mp3” (google.com)
- MP3 (en.wikipedia.org)
- Karlheinz Brandenburg (en.wikipedia.org)
- Tom's Diner (en.wikipedia.org)
a cappella, which is exactly why it was so hard to compress
- Psychoacoustics (en.wikipedia.org)
- Auditory masking (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
MP3 throws away what your ears wouldn't have noticed anyway: quieter sounds close in frequency or time to louder ones get masked. Most of the compression is a model of human hearing, not just clever math.
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