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 iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So I'm getting ready to go on vacation,
Speaker 1: which means we've got some classic episodes lined up for you. Actually,
Speaker 1: these aren't that classic. These came out last year and
Speaker 1: today I thought I would bring a short one for you.
Speaker 1: This one was published originally on June seventh, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: It's a fun little episode. It is titled what was
Speaker 1: the First MP three? This is like one of those
Speaker 1: pub trivia style tech stuff topics. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1: It's time for a tech stuff tidbits. I'm going to
Speaker 1: answer the question what was the first MP three? Well,
Speaker 1: here's the too long didn't answer. It was Tom's Diner
Speaker 1: by Suzanne Vega. It's a song I personally do not like.
Speaker 1: It's not to say it's a bad song. Just because
Speaker 1: I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad. I just
Speaker 1: mean I personally do not find this song at all appealing.
Speaker 1: But it was, in fact the first MP three. Now,
Speaker 1: if you don't know Tom's Diner. It features Vega giving
Speaker 1: a little slice a life moment from the perspective of
Speaker 1: a man sitting in a diner who feels kind of
Speaker 1: distanced from the world around him. In case you need
Speaker 1: a reminder, here's the first verse of the song. I
Speaker 1: am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner.
Speaker 1: I am waiting at the counter for the man to
Speaker 1: pour the coffee, and he fills it only halfway and
Speaker 1: before I even argue, he is looking out the window
Speaker 1: at somebody coming in. Now that song doesn't work for me.
Speaker 1: I get that it got really popular, especially after someone
Speaker 1: did an unauthorized remix of it, which is the version
Speaker 1: most people know. But it turned out to be an
Speaker 1: absolute perfect song to test the MP three compression algorithm.
Speaker 1: To understand why, we need to learn about the purpose
Speaker 1: of the MP three compression algorithm in the first place.
Speaker 1: So in this case, the compression we're talking about is
Speaker 1: relating to file size. There's an interesting side note. There's
Speaker 1: a different kind of audio compression. This refers to the
Speaker 1: reduction of dynamic range in a recording, and by that
Speaker 1: I mean reducing the volume distance between the loudest and
Speaker 1: the softest parts of a recording that can actually take
Speaker 1: a part in file compression as well, but that's we're
Speaker 1: going to set it aside. Just put a pin in that,
Speaker 1: take a look at it later on. But with file
Speaker 1: compression generally, the whole goal is to find ways to
Speaker 1: pack information into smaller file sizes. That makes those files
Speaker 1: easier to manage. That's important if you are dealing with
Speaker 1: a limited amount of storage, or maybe you want to
Speaker 1: send the file from one machine to another and you've
Speaker 1: got limited bandwidth so you need smaller file sizes, or
Speaker 1: 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 tossing
Speaker 1: out information that's not necessarily a guarantee. This is what
Speaker 1: makes the MP three a loss e file format. MP
Speaker 1: three is just one example of a loss e file format.
Speaker 1: There are others, and the word loss e means just
Speaker 1: exactly what you think. It means that some information is
Speaker 1: tossed aside or lost in the process of compressing the
Speaker 1: file to a smaller size. The folks who worked on
Speaker 1: the MP three format had to figure out which information
Speaker 1: was most likely to have little to no impact on
Speaker 1: audio quality within an audio file. To do that, they
Speaker 1: had to take into account human psychology and the limitations
Speaker 1: of human hearing. So psychoacoustics played a big part in
Speaker 1: determining the MP three compression algorithm. So for example, by that,
Speaker 1: I mean, let's think of the range of human hearing
Speaker 1: in terms of frequencies for a second, so your typical
Speaker 1: human is able to hear frequencies as low as twenty
Speaker 1: hurts and as high as twenty thousand hurts or twenty
Speaker 1: killer hurts. Hurts in this case references an oscillation per
Speaker 1: second or a vibration per second, So twenty hurts means
Speaker 1: that something is effectively vibrating twenty times per second. So
Speaker 1: if you had a string that when you plucked, it
Speaker 1: would vibrate twenty times per second. That string is vibrating
Speaker 1: at twenty hurts. That would be a very very low note.
Speaker 1: The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, and as
Speaker 1: we age, we tend to lose the ability to hear
Speaker 1: some of those higher pitches, which is why you would
Speaker 1: hear about some convenience stores experimenting with playing very high
Speaker 1: pitch noises to discourage young punks who wanted to loiter
Speaker 1: in the joint. So human hearing has limitations, and in
Speaker 1: theory you can eliminate sounds that would fall outside of
Speaker 1: those limitations. If a sound file contains frequencies that are
Speaker 1: at twenty one killer hertz, but your typical person can't
Speaker 1: hear anything above twenty killer hertz, well, at least theoretically,
Speaker 1: you can just toss that information and it won't change anything.
Speaker 1: If a sound file contains a sound but no one
Speaker 1: has the capacity to hear it, does a tree fall
Speaker 1: in the forest? Might be getting a little lost in
Speaker 1: the woods here anyway. That frequency example, that's just one
Speaker 1: example of the sound that humans would have trouble hearing.
Speaker 1: So another is when we hear a very soft sound
Speaker 1: that immediately follows a very loud sound, we don't actually
Speaker 1: perceive the soft one. The loud sound we hear eclipses
Speaker 1: the soft sound, and it turns out we can't hear
Speaker 1: the soft one at all. So again, if we can't
Speaker 1: hear that soft sound that played immediately after a loud one,
Speaker 1: why would you keep it? You know, you might as
Speaker 1: well just get rid of the information you can't hear
Speaker 1: it anyway, Just get rid of it, save the space.
Speaker 1: This psychoacoustic approach to sound would lead the developers of
Speaker 1: the MP three format to create a strategy regarding what
Speaker 1: information to keep and what information to ditch. On top
Speaker 1: of that, the algorithm had sort of a sliding scale,
Speaker 1: So maybe you want to keep as much information as possible,
Speaker 1: so you select that when you create the MP three
Speaker 1: So you're losing less information in the process. You're still
Speaker 1: compressing the file, but not to the extent that you
Speaker 1: could if you chose. Maybe the most important thing to
Speaker 1: you is that you reduce the file size as much
Speaker 1: 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 was 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. Brandenburg would use that track while tweaking
Speaker 1: the algorithm, trying to create the thin line between an
Speaker 1: effective data compression technique and a minimal impact on sound quality,
Speaker 1: and for her contributions to the effort, although she made
Speaker 1: them unknowingly, branden Berg would name Suzanne Vega the mother
Speaker 1: of the MP three. Interestingly, Ryan maguire decided to take
Speaker 1: 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 MP 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 dismissed. 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: helped shape the overall sound and tone the piece. So
Speaker 1: 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 create 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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