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Jonathan Sterne , MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2012), ISBN 978-0-822-35283-9 (hb), 978-0-822-35287-7 (pb).
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Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world experience music via digital files that use an audio coding format known as MP3. As Jonathan Sterne reveals in this comprehensive book, the name was chosen with an eye to marketing. After all, 'MP3' is rather more catchy than the original name for the format, 'MPEG-1 audio layer 3' (202). You might have some vague idea of what MP3 means. You might have heard stories about how Suzanne Vega's song 'Tom's Diner' played a role in the testing for the format. And you will certainly be familiar with the idea that MP3s played a major part in some seismic changes in the business of music, involving piracy and lots of newspaper articles about struggling record companies. Jonathan Sterne's book will tell you all you need to know about this extraordinary format, first codified in 1992 and widely adopted from about 1998 onwards, and its seemingly remarkable effects.
MP3: The Meaning of a Format does a great deal more too. In fact, for some readers, it will probably provide a bit too much information and theory about other things. It's just over half way through the main text of the book (131 pages out of 240) that we get to what became known as the MP3, when we arrive in Hanover, Germany, for a meeting of a group of digital audio experts, as part of a conference of a newly established standards body, the Moving Pictures Expert Group. That's what those four letters MPEG stand for. (Strangely, the MP in MP3 means Moving Pictures, even though the MP3 is an audio format; the 3 means 'layer 3' - the third of the three standards approved by the Group.) The 130 pages leading up to that 1988 meeting comprise a long and weighty introduction, and three historical chapters that explore the development of the 'perceptual coding' and 'masking' technologies that enabled the audio coding that underpins MP3. This section of the book involves a long journey into telephonic research at AT&T's Bell Labs in the 1920s,...