July 11, 2022, 6:33 pm | Read time: 5 minutes
For the younger generation, digital music enjoyment has become standard. Streaming or downloading songs through music platforms such as Apple Music has completely changed our listening habits and, in the process, destroyed the traditional business model of record labels. Shelves full of CDs or vinyl records are now only found among a few music purists. How did the triumph of MP3 unfold?
The audio format MP3 is only in its late twenties in terms of age. However, the development of the Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer III–the full name of this revolutionary file format–began in the early 1980s.
Overview
A Dissertation Makes History
The MP3 story begins in Franconia, specifically at the University of Erlangen. At the Chair of Technical Electronics, not only Karlheinz Brandenburg is studying. Professor Dieter Seitzer is also working on compressing music so it can be sent over a digital telephone line (ISDN). Since he is not making progress with the research, he assigns his student Karlheinz Brandenburg to the task. Brandenburg, who loves music, dedicates himself to solving this problem starting in 1982. At the same time, Brandenburg writes his doctoral thesis on the subject. What he doesn’t know: The result of his research will turn the entire music industry’s business models upside down.
Of course, Brandenburg is not working alone on such a complex task. Together with other music-loving fellow students, he sets to work. Very soon, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen takes notice of the students’ work. Experts at the Fraunhofer Institute are also dealing with the topic. By now, it’s not just about transmitting music via ISDN, but also about the possibilities of transmitting music via the newly developed digital radio standard DAB.
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This Problem Needs Solving
By 1987, the group of students and researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute still has no idea of the further possibilities compressed music files could offer. The audio experts are still trying to disprove the textbook opinion: Music cannot be compressed. At that time, there are already compression formats for videos and speech.
To get closer to a solution, the researchers also study the functioning of the human inner ear. They make a groundbreaking discovery: Certain tones overlap during the normal hearing process, meaning specifically that these pitches sound the same, and differences cannot be heard.
Conversely, this means that some tones can simply be omitted because the human ear does not hear them separately anyway. This significantly reduces the size of the music file compared to the digital original file on a CD. The young researchers align all future work with this new insight.
“Tom’s Diner” Defines the MP3 Standard
The aspiring doctoral candidate Karlheinz Brandenburg takes on the task of procuring enough audio samples. He sets out with 1,000 marks, scours various record stores in Erlangen, and returns to the Fraunhofer Institute with a bag full of records.
Brandenburg acquires music from all possible genres, from metal to classical. This later proves to be a great advantage. Each member of the research group has different musical preferences. This significantly advances the work on the solution to compress music. For example, the rocker hears certain peculiarities in rock songs that the folk music fan does not.
Karlheinz Brandenburg loves the music of American folk singer Suzanne Vega. In a hi-fi magazine, the aspiring doctor reads that speaker manufacturers use Suzanne Vega’s voice to test quality. Therefore, Brandenburg obtains the song “Tom’s Diner” in a version without music and only with Suzanne Vega’s voice. With the help of this song, the research group achieves the decisive breakthrough, and Brandenburg receives his doctorate.
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MP3 Conquers the World
However, the world outside the sacred halls of research knows nothing of this groundbreaking development. As is often the case, the story could have turned out quite differently. The industry was also researching a format to compress music. There were attempts to outdo MP3 and establish MP2.
In the end, it is not necessarily technical superiority that prevails, but a significant leap of faith in the work of the Fraunhofer Institute. On July 14, 1995, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen decides: “The extension for a novel audio compression algorithm–technically ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3–is now called ‘.mp3’.”
Incidentally, the real MP3 boom is due to a criminal hack. The Fraunhofer researchers had placed a reference encoder on the still-young Internet for demonstration purposes. It was only supposed to encode one minute of music. A student cracked the encoder and bypassed the time limit. He put his hacked version online for free. This quickly led to the business model of Napster and other illegal music download portals.
Apple Brings MP3 to Fame
It was Steve Jobs of Apple who recognized the true potential of MP3 and freed the download of music files from illegality. With the iPod and the slogan “1000 Songs in Your Pocket”, the Apple CEO turned the music world upside down once and for all in 2001.
And today? MP3 itself has been officially history since 2017. That was when the official licensing programs ended. However, MP3 lives on in new, modern audio formats such as AAC, used by Apple, or the further development xHE-AAC. These formats were also significantly developed with the help of experts at the Fraunhofer Institute IIS in Erlangen.