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"The Ghost in the MP3" - What MP3 Compression Removes from Music

R

Retrovert

pfm Member
A new take on an old debate.

http://ryanmaguiremusic.com/theghostinthemp3.html

The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III standard, more commonly referred to as MP3, has become a nearly ubiquitous digital audio file format. First published in 1993, this codec implements a lossy compression algorithm based on a perceptual model of human hearing. Listening tests, primarily designed by and for western-european white men, and using the music they liked, were used to refine the encoder. These tests determined which sounds were perceptually important and which could be erased or altered. I ask, however: what have we lost? It is commonly accepted that MP3's create audible artifacts such as pre-echo, but what does the music which this codec deletes sound like? In the work presented here, I consider and develop techniques to recover these lost sounds, the ghosts in the MP3,
and reformulate these sounds as art.
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The author seems to have attempted to write it as a scientific article but has done a very poor job of doing so.

Not that I dismiss the authors knowledge or skill.
 
No, it's academic writing style this applies to arts as well as sciences. he is just showing his working methodology.

He seems to be developing a subtractive composition methodology in the spectral and time domain, aka "ghost composition" (which has another meaning in this context but it's perfectly ok to call the process something easy-to-remember) it's not new but it is interesting and a very apt and worthy aspect of study. strictly speaking its re-composition (or recontextualization as arts lecturers like to refer to this form of radial re-use of preexisting art).

Looks undergrad sonic arts level 2 nd year presentation, something I might have done a few years ago in my degree as part of spectral composition. I could be wrong but there is enough material here for masters-level Electroacoustic composition dissertation, he is in a busy field, mind.

tl;dr interesting, worthwhile study.
 
The arrival of formats such as MP3 marked a new phase in human experience....for the first time we are being presented with sounds which has been processed to remove natural elements. It's a bit like scientists taking natural food and stripping away every ingredient they assume people can't 'detect.'
The idea behind our hobby has been to achieve better sound, now we have a whole movement driven by the urge to reduce quality to the lowest level they can get away with . It's fuelled by nothing but commercialism, foisting on people second-rate formats because it is more profitable. We can't stop it, but we should never praise it...it lowers standards not raises them.
One of the reasons why, in the hobby, I use only analogue; whatever it's faults, it doesn't try to reduce quality. And, remarkably, to my ears, it still sounds comfortably the better format.
 
It's interesting to hear what's missing in the WAV minus MP3 files. However making music out of it is a step too "ar/utistic" for me.
 
paskinn said:
The arrival of formats such as MP3 marked a new phase in human experience....for the first time we are being presented with sounds which has been processed to remove natural elements. It's a bit like scientists taking natural food and stripping away every ingredient they assume people can't 'detect.'
The idea behind our hobby has been to achieve better sound, now we have a whole movement driven by the urge to reduce quality to the lowest level they can get away with . It's fuelled by nothing but commercialism, foisting on people second-rate formats because it is more profitable. We can't stop it, but we should never praise it...it lowers standards not raises them.
One of the reasons why, in the hobby, I use only analogue; whatever it's faults, it doesn't try to reduce quality. And, remarkably, to my ears, it still sounds comfortably the better format.
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The only problem being that it's quality is intrinsically compromised by the limitations of the recording & playback processes.

Which is why we should welcome lossless digital.

Chris
 
One thing is clear from this thread; neither digital nor analogue advocates understand the proper use of the apostrophe.
 
Sure, for some who just like their tunes, it will always be this way, perhaps, but its a developing field with a widening audience as we exhaust western musical idioms and have run out of non western forms to plunder and steal from, artists are exploring the boundaries of what is possible, naturally this leads to artistic exploration, no different to the Jazz Pioneers of Ornette Coleman or Michel Wintsch or Joachim Kühn or countless other out there artists working in exploratory fields, without whom no progress in sound, art and audio as music is made.

I listen to re-frequencied network traffic sometimes, its a very dense form of music to me, like a linear form of AFX meets Autechre. I am considering a similar path to the cited article.
 
Joe Hutch said:
One thing is clear from this thread; neither digital nor analogue advocates understand the proper use of the apostrophe.
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Dunno whether you refer to my post, but I think my use is correct.

The word its refers to possession, and the use of the apostrophe in the word it's signifies a missing letter i.e. it is .


JC
 
jcbrum said:
Dunno whether you refer to my post, but I think my use is correct.

The word its refers to possession, and the use of the apostrophe in the word it's signifies a missing letter i.e. it is .


JC
Click to expand...

Your use was indeed correct, but two previous posts both had it's when its was needed (it's faults, it's quality).
 
I assume you refer to post #6.

It's possible that Mescalito or paskinn, or both, have a misconfigured spellchecker.

I recently updated to OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks, and the revised spell checker was a retrograde step. It continually second guesses (wrongly) my spelling and punctuation, and auto-corrects (wrongly). It's a big nuisance.

JC
 
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