Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? It's time for a tech Stuff tidbits. I'm
Speaker 1: going to answer the question what was the first MP three? Well,
Speaker 1: here's the too long, didn't listen answer. It was Tom's
Speaker 1: Diner by Suzanne Vega. It's a song I personally do
Speaker 1: not like. That's not to say it's a bad song.
Speaker 1: Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad.
Speaker 1: I just mean I personally do not find this song
Speaker 1: at all appealing. But it was, in fact the first
Speaker 1: MP three. Now, if you don't know Tom's Diner, it
Speaker 1: features Vega giving a little slice a life moment from
Speaker 1: the perspective of a man sitting in a diner who
Speaker 1: feels kind of distanced from the world around him. In
Speaker 1: case you need a reminder, here's the first verse of
Speaker 1: the song. I am sitting in the morning at the
Speaker 1: diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter
Speaker 1: for the man to pour the coffee, and he fills
Speaker 1: it only halfway and before I even argue he is
Speaker 1: looking out the window at somebody coming in. Now that
Speaker 1: song doesn't work for me. I get that it got
Speaker 1: really popular, especially after someone did an unauthorized remix of it,
Speaker 1: which is the version most people know. But it turned
Speaker 1: out to be an absolute perfect song to test the
Speaker 1: MP three compression algorithm. To understand why, we need to
Speaker 1: learn about the purpose of the MP three compression algorithm
Speaker 1: in the first place. So in this case, the compression
Speaker 1: we're talking about is relating to file size. There's an
Speaker 1: interesting side note. There's a different kind of audio compression.
Speaker 1: This refers to the reduction of diner range in a recording,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean reducing the volume distance between
Speaker 1: the loudest and the softest parts of a recording. That
Speaker 1: can actually take a part in file compression as well,
Speaker 1: but that's we're going to set it aside. Just put
Speaker 1: a pin in that, take a look at it later on.
Speaker 1: But with file compression generally, the whole goal is to
Speaker 1: find ways to pack information into smaller file sizes. That
Speaker 1: makes those files easier to manage. That's important if you
Speaker 1: are dealing with a limited amount of storage, or maybe
Speaker 1: you want to send the file from one machine to another.
Speaker 1: And you've got limited bandwidth, so you need smaller file sizes,
Speaker 1: or else the process is going to take way too long.
Speaker 1: But how do you do it well? One approach to
Speaker 1: file compression is to take a real good look at
Speaker 1: the file you're trying to compress, and you ask the question,
Speaker 1: is all the information that is inside this file necessary?
Speaker 1: Or could I get rid of some of that information
Speaker 1: and still have a usable file on the other side
Speaker 1: of it With music. That means figuring out which bits
Speaker 1: of data you can drop without it having a noticeable
Speaker 1: effect on the audio quality. Ideally, the compressed file would
Speaker 1: be indistinguishable from the original raw audio, but since you're
Speaker 1: tossing out information, that's not necessarily a guarantee. This is
Speaker 1: what makes the MP three a loss e file format.
Speaker 1: MP three is just one example of a loss e
Speaker 1: file format. There are others, and the word loss e
Speaker 1: means just exactly what you think. It means that some
Speaker 1: information is tossed aside or lost in the process of
Speaker 1: compressing the file to a smaller size. The folks who
Speaker 1: worked on the MP three format had to figure out
Speaker 1: which information was most likely to have little to no
Speaker 1: impact on audio quality within an audio file. To do that,
Speaker 1: they had to take into account human psychology and the
Speaker 1: limitations of human hearing. So psychoacoustics played a big part
Speaker 1: in determining the MP three compression algorithm. So for example,
Speaker 1: by that, I mean, let's think of the range of
Speaker 1: human hearing in terms of frequencies for a second, So
Speaker 1: your typical human is able to hear frequencies as low
Speaker 1: as twenty hurts and as high as twenty thousand hurts
Speaker 1: or twenty killer hurts. Hurts in this case references an
Speaker 1: oscillation per second or a vibration per second, So twenty
Speaker 1: hurts means that something is effectively vibrating twenty times per second.
Speaker 1: So if you had a string that when you plucked,
Speaker 1: it would vibrate twenty times per second, that string is
Speaker 1: vibrating at twenty hurts. That would be a very very
Speaker 1: low note. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch,
Speaker 1: and as we age we tend to lose the ability
Speaker 1: to hear some of those higher pitches, which is why
Speaker 1: you would hear about some convenience stores experimenting with playing
Speaker 1: very high pitched noises to discourage young punks who wanted
Speaker 1: to loiter in the joint. So human hearing has limitations,
Speaker 1: and in theory you can eliminate sounds that would fall
Speaker 1: outside of those limitations. If a sound file contains frequencies
Speaker 1: that are at twenty one killer hertz, but your typical
Speaker 1: person can't hear anything above twenty killer hertz, well, at
Speaker 1: least theoretically, you can just toss that information and it
Speaker 1: won't change anything. If a sound file contains a sound
Speaker 1: but no one has the capacity to hear it, does
Speaker 1: a tree fall in the forest. Might be getting a
Speaker 1: little lost in the woods here anyway. That frequency example,
Speaker 1: that's just one example of the sound that humans would
Speaker 1: have trouble hearing. So another is when we hear a
Speaker 1: very soft sound that immediately follows a very loud sound,
Speaker 1: we don't actually perceive the soft one. The loud sound
Speaker 1: we hear eclipses the soft sound, and it turns out
Speaker 1: we can't hear the soft one at all. So again,
Speaker 1: if we can't hear that soft sound that played immediately
Speaker 1: after a loud one, why would you keep it? You know,
Speaker 1: you might as well just get rid of that information.
Speaker 1: You can't hear it anyway, Just get rid of it.
Speaker 1: Save the space. This psychoacoustic approach to sound would lead
Speaker 1: the developers of the MP three format to create a
Speaker 1: strategy regarding what information to keep and what information to ditch.
Speaker 1: On top of that, the algorithm had sort of a
Speaker 1: sliding scale, so maybe you want to keep as much
Speaker 1: information as possible, so you select that when you create
Speaker 1: the MP three So you're losing less information in the process.
Speaker 1: You're still impressing the file, but not to the extent
Speaker 1: that you could if you chose. Maybe the most important
Speaker 1: thing to you is that you reduce the file size
Speaker 1: as much as you can, so you crank the compression up. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously the harder you go, the more likely you're going
Speaker 1: to lose information that will make a noticeable difference in
Speaker 1: the playback of the audio file, and you'll you would say, oh,
Speaker 1: the quality here is not as good as I thought
Speaker 1: it would be. This is where Tom's Diner comes in.
Speaker 1: Carl Heinz Brandenburg, who is one of the leads on
Speaker 1: creating the MP three format, used Tom's Diner to listen
Speaker 1: back to compressed files and determine how the compression was
Speaker 1: affecting the audio quality. So it was a great track
Speaker 1: to use because the actual qualities of the recording itself
Speaker 1: were such that it was easy to detect if something
Speaker 1: was not quite right. The original recording of Tom's Diner
Speaker 1: is not the one that has the catchy beat and
Speaker 1: the horns in it. It's a very simple a cappella
Speaker 1: recording of Suzanne Vegas singing her tale of looking at
Speaker 1: the world from a male perspective through a sense of
Speaker 1: distance and attachment. Branden Berg would use that track while
Speaker 1: tweaking the algorithm, trying to create the thin line between
Speaker 1: an effective data compression technique and a minimal impact on
Speaker 1: sound quality. And for her contributions to the effort, although
Speaker 1: she made them unknowingly, Brandenburg would name Suzanne Vega the
Speaker 1: mother of the mp three. Interestingly, Ryan maguire decided to
Speaker 1: take a sort of negative image of the compressed Tom's Diner.
Speaker 1: He identified sounds that were deleted in the process of
Speaker 1: creating a lossy version of Tom's Diner, and then it
Speaker 1: created a new recording that contained only the bits that
Speaker 1: had been cut from the file. And it's almost like
Speaker 1: listening to the ghost of a song. In fact, I
Speaker 1: think they called the project the Ghost of the MPIE three.
Speaker 1: It's pretty creepy stuff. It would not be out of
Speaker 1: place in a horror movie. The fact that lossy files
Speaker 1: by definition lose information in the process of data compression
Speaker 1: meant that audio files dismiss the MP three format is
Speaker 1: inherently inferior to others, at least as far as listening
Speaker 1: experiences go. And there are arguments that some of the
Speaker 1: lost information, while potentially being imperceptible within the song itself,
Speaker 1: help shape the overall sound and tone of the piece.
Speaker 1: So though you can't directly hear the stuff that's being cut,
Speaker 1: that stuff actually influences how you perceive other things, so
Speaker 1: you still change the experience of hearing the finished audio.
Speaker 1: But the MP three format created the opportunity to store
Speaker 1: and transfer audio files without having to deal with massive
Speaker 1: raw audio formats, and back in the day that was
Speaker 1: not a trivial thing. And so that is the answer
Speaker 1: to the question Tom's Diner the first MP three Hope
Speaker 1: you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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