MP3: The Meaning of a Format

Sign, Storage, Transmission

by Jonathan Sterne

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, 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."

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Technology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Academic

360 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2012

About the author

Jonathan Sterne is James McGill Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, both also published by Duke University Press, and is editor of The Sound Studies Reader. He also makes music and other audio works.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Won on Goodreads in May 2012.

A few pages into the book and I can already tell that this book will be terrible to read. The topic is all over the place. One paragraph is about one thing and then the next is talking about something completely different without much of a transfer.

The small print and very long paragraphs don't help it any but that may be due to it being an uncorrected proof. Usually in technical books the jargon is the stumbling point in the writing and reading. Amazingly the jargon here is the most readable part. It reads like a dissertation with a lot of wording chosen to impress professors. Too many overcomplicated words and phrases that could have been, and should have been, replaced with something simpler and in many cases shorter. A lot of the paragraphs could have been condensed to a couple of sentences to make the same exact point.

I would somewhat understand this in a scholarly publication in a research journal that targets a very specific audience. Even then such pretentious writing is not encouraged. This seems to be aimed at a broader audience as it's (1) not published in a computer science scholarly journal and (2) on Goodreads as a giveaway to a broader audience.

If this going to be published for the general population to read the I would strongly recommend that this be read and edited by someone outside of the scholarly field to make sure it is readable. The idea is interesting and I can see that there are really good facts here in there but it's cluttered by everything else. I see attempts at making it like a historical story of the format, which would be great if it were written more like a history book than a journal article.

The readability improves very slightly with subsequent chapters. There are still many tangents that could be cut or put in a context where they actually fit.

Even if this was to be a text book it would need some serious editing. Giving this to students as mandatory reading would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Spoiler/ note: Poor cats, though good to know the sacrifice.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I went into this book expecting it to be something quite different, I really enjoyed the way that Sterne constructed the history of MP3s by looking WAY back into the early history of auditory technologies. Moreover, I think his theoretical intervention--the idea that privileging format rather than material when studying media--is an important one that comes at exactly the right time. Overall, his is a thorough and often entertaining account of the various parties and circumstances that go into making this particular format ubiquitous. He exposes the contingency of such popularity even while often seeming admiring it.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent 17 years working on the Music Genome Project for Pandora Radio. In the early years we would rip the CD’s we were analyzing into a row of computers converting the audio to MP3’s. This book really opened my eyes to the long history of the infrastructure that was established – going back almost 100 years – that resulted in the development of the MP3 and the way perceptual coding inscribes a cultural logic in our society that reaches every aspect of our daily lives.

Sterne’s observation that the MP3 didn’t liberate music but instead demonetized it, without offering a new framework of value inspired me to write a piece exploring this: From Napster to Now - How We Lost the Thread and to the broader revelation that the future of music is offline.

[Joshua Line · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The technique of removing redundant data in a file is called compression. The technique of using a model of a listener to remove additional data is a special kind of “lossy” compression called perceptual coding. Because it uses both kinds of compression, the MP3 carries within it practical and philosophical understandings of what it means to communicate, what it means to listen or speak, how the mind’s ear works, and what it means to make music. Encoded in every MP3 are whole worlds of possible and impossible sound and whole histories of sonic practices... But MP3 encoders build their files by calculating a moment- to- moment relationship between the changing contents of a recording and the gaps and absences of an imagined listener at the other end. The MP3 encoder works so well because it guesses that its imagined auditor is an imperfect listener, in less-than-ideal conditions. It often guesses right.

[Kevin Krein · Rating 4 out of 5]

coming off of reading r.kelly's autobiography right before opening this, the shift in.....reading/comprehension levels was difficult. an interesting book that tracks the technology of the mp3 way back to the early days of the telephone industry and how they have become the most widely used audio format, even though most of the time, they sound terrible.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best music/sound/media books I have read. I recommend it to everyone interested in the history of sound recording and the MP3. Definitely not just for academics (but not, of course, an easy read).

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would not be who I am without the Mp3.

A long and dense but endlessly rewarding read. Looking at the MP3 as a standard, as a container, as a cultural object, as a bundle of affordances, as the result of the slow accretion of knowledge, as a representation of our biases, as an engineering problem, as a profit-motive for coalitions of companies, as a recording, as a commodity, as an inflection point in history, but also as a fairly mundane event.

Our listening conditions condition our listening preference: Vinyl's warmth and crackle, tape's fuzz and atmosphere, CD's clarity and range, radio's tinniness and volume, and the MP3's compression and pre-echo are all inevitable physical qualities that transform into something else through our habitual listening and appreciation. The Mp3 is in no way unique, but it has unique aspects that will outlive it.

This book released juuuuuuust before Spotify (which uses the open-source OGG VORBIS audio format instead of Mp3) really blew up though, and while I do think it is a bit outside the scope of the book, I think that it has massive implications for access to digital music, a conversation that was only started due to the ubiquity of the Mp3. An essential reading for those interested in the history of music's place in our daily lives and wondering where we are going after this.

[Shadow Moon]

I’m not sure I have time to read and learn about the history of the mp3 format, although I guess it could be really interesting and fun. But yeah, mp3s are a must, and it’s a super popular and widely used format. I recently found a youtube to mp3 converter, which really made life easier because now I can quickly turn a youtube video into an mp3 and listen to it on my phone or use it for video editing.

[Lee Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

One would think it’s a very dry subject but it’s actually very juicy. But it’s not light reading by any means.

[Yisu Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

在听了《不在场》的最新一期节目之后兴之所至找来读。题外话，节目本身已经很棒了，但这本书把MP3这一技术名词置于了更深、时间更广的历史脉络里，大开眼界。从perceptual technics 一百年来的发展，到50年来信息论提供的驯化「噪音」的理论工具，再到最近30年工程学对于masking的改进和codecs、标准的竞争。这同时也是人类听觉不断被技术渗入、改造、共同「演化」的历史。

[Simon Magus · Rating 5 out of 5]

another certified banger from the GOAT

[Duke Press]

“Rigorous and quietly philosophical, MP3 situates this world-conquering format in a broader context than the familiar stories of college kids downloading wild and the death of the recording industry. . . . Sterne’s fascination with the MP3 and its possibilities yields a book that is, really, a history of auditory culture’s startling attempts to beam sound across great distances. . . . Sterne’s MP3 is an important work in various academic fields, but his probing questions about the future of digital culture have consequences beyond the specialized reader.” --Hua Hsu, Slate

“The insights offered here are not only of interest to the study of sound and music but reach beyond to the theorisation of digital media technologies and the understanding of how communication formats develop. . . . [T]his study shows the importance of continuities and the cross-referencing of media formats, offering a fresh entry point in the histories of sound and communications as well as of digital technologies.” --Hillegonda Rietveld, Times Higher Education Supplement

“Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.” -- Eric Harvey, Pitchfork

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a pretty boring book. Though there is a ton of detail and history of the MP3 and the general evolution of digital audio, it still seems like a surface level analysis. Though Stearne describes this work as a genealogy, it lacks the depth I would expect. It's no revelation these days to say that certain ideologies and corporate/capital interests influence the way things are produced in the world. What is severely lacking in this book is any sort of analysis of how the MP3 or digital audios shape the self and one's sociality.

On a topical note, there is also no mention of cloud computing when discussing the future obsolescence of MP3s. It seems to me like the cloud is the forefront of something, and while it may not replace other forms of digital audio, it serves as an influence for what the future will look like.

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a journey. Overall Mp3 may come off a bit dry of a read. The author is clearly an academic, bu mixed in if you pay attention is a decent amount of wit, and clearly a deep understanding of the current cultural climate. Sterne writes from a point of understanding acknowledging privilege within the history of mp3.

This book is also thorough and deep tangenting at times to stories about figures related, but giving a wholistically insightful history and cultural exploration of the mp3 format.

The math and compsci specifically are not discussed, but if you can handle a bit of a dry read, the knowledge gained here is worth it.

[GONZA · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hard to read and hard to understand.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOK FOR THE PREVIEW