One day in 2000, I dropped my daughter, Ruby, off at nursery school and was approached by one of the fathers I didn’t know very well. Imagine my surprise when he said, “Congratulations on being the mother of MP3!” he said.
“Sorry?” I said, wondering what he was talking about.
“There is an article this week in a magazine called Business 2.0, calling you the ‘mother of the MP3.’ They used one of your songs to create it.”
“Really. Well, thanks. I’ll check it out.”
I ran home and found the article online.
The title was “Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter: The MP3 Format is a Product of Suzanne Vega’s Voice and This Man’s Ears.”
“The MP3 fools the ear by eliminating the least essential parts of a music file…To create MP3 [Karl-Heinz] Brandenberg had to appreciate how the human ear perceives sound. A key assist in this effort came from Suzanne Vega. ‘I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm,’ Brandenberg recalls. “Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing “Tom’s Diner.” I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice.”‘
Video of how the song was created and her performing it in the original acapella.
And the DNA version of the song
No comments:
Post a Comment