MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Sign, Storage, Transmission) - Softcover

Sterne, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822352877 ISBN 13: 9780822352877

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

MP3: The Meaning of a Format

recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s.

MP3s are products of compression, a process that removes sounds unlikely to be heard from recordings. Although media history is often characterized as a progression toward greater definition, fidelity, and truthfulness, MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates the crucial role of compression in the development of modern media and sound culture. Taking the history of compression as his point of departure, Jonathan Sterne investigates the relationships among sound, silence, sense, and noise; the commodity status of recorded sound and the economic role of piracy; and the importance of standards in the governance of our emerging media culture. He demonstrates that formats, standards, and infrastructures—and the need for content to fit inside them—are every bit as central to communication as the boxes we call "media."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is the author of the award-winning book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of The Sound Studies Reader. Sterne has written for Tape Op, Punk Planet, Bad Subjects, and other alternative press venues. He also makes music and other audio works. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

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MP3

THE MEANING OF A FORMATBy Jonathan Sterne

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5287-7

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................ixFormat Theory...........................................................11. Perceptual Technics..................................................322. Nature Builds No Telephones..........................................613. Perceptual Coding and the Domestication of Noise.....................924. Making a Standard....................................................1285. Of MPEG, Measurement, and Men........................................1486. Is Music a Thing?....................................................184The End of MP3..........................................................227Notes...................................................................247List of Interviews......................................................295Bibliography............................................................299Index...................................................................331

Chapter One

PERCEPTUAL TECHNICS

In 1938 the unfortunately named Professor Edwin G. Boring wrote that "really not so very much happened in the sixty years after" Hermann von Helmholtz published On the Sensations of Tone in 1863. By this, he meant that Helmholtz inaugurated a new paradigm for understanding hearing—one grounded in the methods and ideas of physiology and physics—that other researchers played out for six decades. The judgment may have been a bit skewed by Boring's interests. But something did change in hearing research—especially American hearing research—in the 1910s and 1920s. Researchers and money poured into the field, and hearing studies began to shift their touchstones from physiological and physical models to a particular set of psychological models. During this period, psychologists and engineers devised ways of thinking about sound, hearing, and technology that shaped media for the rest of the twentieth century.

The shadow of a listener imprinted in every MP3 has its origins in the history of psychoacoustics as an academic subject and the history of a particular kind of imagined human subject within that field. Starting about one hundred years ago, the needs and interests of telephone research increasingly conditioned the problems, materials, and methods of hearing research, transforming the field and providing the foundations for modern psychoacoustics (as well as speech therapy and several other related fields). The models of the hearing subject, and the ideas of information that make possible the MP3 format and digital audio, were rooted in specific problems faced by AT&T as it sought to increase its profits as an industrial monopoly. This chapter focuses on the origins of modern psychoacoustics, while the next chapter considers the development of information theory. The Bell System and a burgeoning electrical components industry provided both fields with plenty of sunshine and fertilizer to nurture their growth.

This chapter and the next explore how the nature and tenor of the connections and analogies between ears and sound technologies shifted in the early twentieth century. In part, this was a result of the change from the dominance of physiological acoustics to psychoacoustics in hearing research. Not only did each field construct a different model of the ear, but the two fields also posed hearing as different kinds of problems and in different kinds of spaces. In the history of aural-electrical thought, the 1910s and 1920s marked the beginning of a shift from the middle ear as the site of inquiry toward the inner ear and the mind. Similarly, conceptions of what was transmitted by ears and media changed. Telegraphic electricity signified a message (as did the messages in the nervous system), but telephonic electricity was transduced from sound and back into sound. Between these moments, sound would come to exist as information. An electrics of a resonant middle ear gave way to an electronics and informatics of the inner ear. Bell's drive to conserve bandwidth led the company to participate in the development of a new way of thinking about perception, its limits, and the limits of communication technologies that still echoes in the design of new media a hundred years later. Perceptual coding descends from Bell's initial quest to squeeze more profit out of its infrastructure, as do many of the electronic and digital communications technologies that surround us. Riffing on Friedrich Nietzsche's discussion of aesthetics in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, John Durham Peters writes that early sound media were forms of "applied physiology." As research into the telephone and research into hearing collided, the converse also came to be true. Psychoacoustics and information theory were theoretical extrapolations of communication technologies.

Audiometry and the Emergence of Modern Psychoacoustics

Standard stories about the history of hearing research mark two major shifts in the twentieth century: an orientational shift from physiological acoustics to psychoacoustics, and a series of major technological changes that transformed the field. Boring's history of hearing research listed specific technologies as turning points in ideas about the ear. Technology also plays a starring role in Audrey B. Davis's and Uta Merzbach's history of hearing research. They note that American research generally followed European work before the First World War in substance, method, and equipment. 3 The authors lament that early twentieth-century university-based psychological researchers could not follow "the path of technology" unless they aligned themselves with engineers in industrial laboratories and clinicians in state laboratories: "These were no longer the days when one could rely on the munificence of a King Maximillian of Bavaria to underwrite an apparatus for vowel construction, as had Helmholtz, or make history as a Bell or an Edison on the basis of invention and entrepreneurship alone. In the industrial society of the twentieth century, scientific advances based on technological breakthroughs have been made with the support of either government or industry." Though their view of Bell and Edison is somewhat romantic (in fact, both benefited greatly from an association with Western Union and private investors), Davis and Merzbach rightly identified a new set of principles guiding scientific research into hearing in the early twentieth century.

Davis and Merzbach write that in the approximate half-century between the publication of the final edition of Hermann Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone and 1930, "audition in psychology passed through a well-defined phase." By this they mean that psychological studies of hearing began the period as a mélange of laboratory psychology, theoretical exploration, and physiological experimentation but ended with the dominance of electrophysiology in the study of hearing. The employment of hearing history by Boring, Davis, and Merzbach echoed an important paper published by the Bell Labs researchers Harvey Fletcher and R. L. Wegel in 1922 titled "The Frequency-Sensitivity of Normal Ears." They list prior attempts to determine absolute thresholds of human hearing. In the process, they directly connect knowledge of hearing to available sound technologies. Consider the technologies used and dates in the list:

1870: organ pipe

1877: whistle

1883: tuning fork

1889: telephone...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822352877
• ISBN 13: 9780822352877
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 358
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland