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posted by CoolHand on Monday May 15 2017, @03:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the pure-sound dept.

Vice Noisey reports on a musician who isolates MP3 artefacts by finding the differences between an MP3 and a lossless recording, then samples them to create his own music (N.B. the examples are hosted on Soundcloud; Javascript is needed to listen to them).

These days though, in our rush to listen to all music everywhere at all times, we often sacrifice these layers by listening to the most readily available streams or downloads, which are usually relatively crappy formats like MP3, AAC, or whatever the hell Grooveshark uses, which can sometimes sound like the recording of a song being through a coke can in a garden shed.

Often, we're losing out on a significant amount of what the artist intended, because when the original analog music is converted to one of these formats, certain layers of sound are lost in the digital compression. Translation: there's a lots of bits to your favourite albums that you may have never even heard.

Exploring this, is the Ghost in the MP3 project by doctoral music student Ryan Maguire from the University of Virginia's Center for Computer Music. He investigates these lost layers of sound, what they sound like when rescued, and then tries to make new music with them. For an example in his study, he took the layers of sound lost to compression from the acapella song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, which was also the template song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg, the pioneer of the MP3, to test whether the compression of MP3s worked. You can hear the track he made from those bits below.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday May 15 2017, @07:13PM (15 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 15 2017, @07:13PM (#510185)

    Also, I find this sentence from TFA amusing: "Often, we're losing out on a significant amount of what the artist intended, because when the original analog music is converted to one of these formats, certain layers of sound are lost in the digital compression." A few funny things about this: (1) in the era where many artists intentionally make use of digital artifacts or intentionally use Autotune or whatever, it's a blanket statement that we're losing out on a "significant amount" of what the artist intended

    I'm sorry, but this is just plain wrong.

    A true artist does not use Autotune. Anything made with Autotune isn't real art, it's just corporate crap produced for mass consumption.

    Finally, they're probably not complaining about digitization, they're complaining about lossy compression. There's a huge difference. Not all music is stored in a lossy format, where information is intentionally discarded to reduce size.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 15 2017, @10:09PM (9 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 15 2017, @10:09PM (#510249) Journal

    Even CD discs and players were introduced, they were lambasted for sounding metallic and not be as good as high end analogue equipment. And that format is very much uncompressed in any matter. You just can't please some people.

    And if instead of CD quality, the record uses 192 kHz with 24-bit multichannel, that should satisfy even the most demanding listeners.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 15 2017, @10:15PM (6 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 15 2017, @10:15PM (#510254)

      It's really too bad the CD standard wasn't set higher than 22.1/16. Perhaps if it had been 44/24 there would have been less complaints. But maybe it wasn't possible to stuff any more data than 650MB on a disc that size without having a different laser. But surely they could have used some simple lossless compression, even back then.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:18AM (5 children)

        by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:18AM (#510310) Journal

        > It's really too bad the CD standard wasn't set higher than 22.1/16.

        You omitted the units, but if you mean to say that CDs have 22,100 samples per second and 16 bits per sample, that's not quite right. They do have 16 bits per sample, but 44,100 samples per second.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc [wikipedia.org]

        The corresponding Nyquist frequency is 22.05 kHz.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency [wikipedia.org]

        FM stereo broadcasts contain a 19 kHz subcarrier; frequencies above that aren't transmitted; that frequency was chosen because most people can't hear frequencies that high. Note that 19 kHz is a bit less than 22.05 kHz.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_stereo#Stereo_FM [wikipedia.org]

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:20AM

          by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:20AM (#510311) Journal

          *clarification: I meant analogue FM stereo broadcasts.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:09AM (3 children)

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:09AM (#510318)

          Whoops, you're right, I was getting the sampling rate mixed up with the Nyquist frequency, and badly at that...

          I guess what I meant to say was that CDs are 44.1/16, and it would have been nice if they instead were 48/24 or 96/24.

          • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 16 2017, @06:22AM (2 children)

            by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @06:22AM (#510411)

            You're in luck! You can make an audio DVD, 24 bits / 96 KHz, Dolby 5.1, most standard (cheap) DVD players will play them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio/ [wikipedia.org]

            • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:52PM (1 child)

              by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:52PM (#510526)

              That's no help at all: all the music is on CD at the very best, MP3 otherwise. I don't record my own music. Where am I going to get a 24/96 version of Led Zeppelin IV, or some more obscure recording from the past?

              • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:29PM

                by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:29PM (#510570)

                ...all the music is on CD at the very best, MP3 otherwise.

                You're not correct; HD audio DVDs exist. I'm disappointed they haven't been pushed more. LZ IV was supposed to be re-released in HD 24/96 format (said Jimmy Page 3 years ago). I'm not sure if it was done- I don't have time to search right now.

                MP3s don't _have_ to be so terrible; I think most people know you can use much higher quality when doing mp3 conversion. When I convert something to .mp3, even if it's just speech and I'm doing 160Kbps (or less) I still choose the higher quality processing modes. It takes slightly longer but so what.

                My point is that most original recorded media/tracks still exist and can be re-mastered to 24/96 format. It's not that hard and I know it's not the bulk of the market but I have to wonder if producers offered the "standard" mp3 for $0.99, and an HD version for $2, what the market would do. The huge resurgence of vinyl (and even cassettes!) makes me think there's a market out there.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday May 15 2017, @11:53PM (1 child)

      by butthurt (6141) on Monday May 15 2017, @11:53PM (#510300) Journal

      I've heard that early CDs were sometimes made with equalisation that was intended for photonograph records. Phonographs "undo" that equalisation but CD players do not. Hence when those CDs are played, high frequencies are over-emphasised. This link explains the equalisation for phonographs, but doesn't say anything about CDs:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday May 17 2017, @02:40AM

        by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @02:40AM (#510896)

        Another problem is that a lot of the early CD players didn't have 16-bit DACs either. So while the data may have been 16-bit, the CD player was down-sampling it which certainly wasn't helping things.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @10:46PM (#510271)

    IAAP (I am a producer).

    Sometimes autotune is exactly, precisely, literally what a person who does music professionally, wants and uses.

    I call these people musicians.

    I'll let them know some dude online doesn't think they're artists. I'm sure they'll be all cut up about that.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 15 2017, @11:08PM (3 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday May 15 2017, @11:08PM (#510283) Journal

    A true artist does not use Autotune.

    To be clear, I was talking about intentional use of Autotune -- not Autotune to "correct" pitches, but Autotune for the sake of the "sound" of Autotune. There are actually quite a few artists who now like to experiment with exaggerated Autotune effects, sort of like over-the-top reverb as an "effect" in old recordings or whatever.

    What constitutes "art" or an "artist" is a question for the ages. But there are people producing tracks with this stuff, and people are buying it.

    Finally, they're probably not complaining about digitization, they're complaining about lossy compression. There's a huge difference.

    I completely understood what they were complaining about. I just find it really funny that the clear "I'm more pretentious than you!" audiophile writer here doesn't realize that most artists (even ones I think you would allow to qualify as "artists" today) don't record "analog" at all anymore. So talking about the "original analog music" that the "artist intended" is just ignorance masquerading as pretentiousness. I'd like to see the results of the author in taking the NPR quiz I linked.

    And just to be clear -- I HATE AUTOTUNE and think it a scourge on music. I also don't consider myself to be an "audiophile" but do find the artifacts of overly compressed MP3's to be annoying, too. On the other hand, I'll fully admit that while I was able to identify the 128 kbps as the "lowest quality" in the NPR quiz, I couldn't reliably distinguish the uncompressed from the 320 kbps in most, even with a good pair of headphones. But even though I could tell the difference in the 128 kbps, I really don't think it's this horrid loss of "artistic intention" that is claimed -- depending on the exact type of recording conditions, instrumentation, etc., the difference can be quite subtle. Unless you're listening through higher end equipment (not like most people who frequently listen through inferior speakers most of the day or through crappy ear buds), this may not be a significant difference to you -- even if you can actually HEAR the difference (which most people can't without training).

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 15 2017, @11:13PM (2 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday May 15 2017, @11:13PM (#510286) Journal

      Oh, and by the way before you start complaining that "the original soundwaves are analog" and that's the "artist's intention," I think that viewpoint is woefully misguided and denigrates the profession of recording engineering which is all about creating a recording the artist is happy with and reflects the "artist's intention." If the artist never gets to hear a true analog mixed near-finished recording, claiming that "analog" is their intention is just BS.

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:04AM (1 child)

        by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @01:04AM (#510316) Journal

        Oh, and by the way before you start complaining that "the original soundwaves are analog" and that's the "artist's intention," [...]

        We can at least be certain that any recordings made prior to 1993 were not intended to be listened to in MP3 format:

        MPEG-1 Audio (MPEG-1 Part 3), which included MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, II and III was approved as a committee draft of ISO/IEC standard in 1991, finalised in 1992 and published in 1993 (ISO/IEC 11172-3:1993).

        -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3 [wikipedia.org]

        Whether they were recorded in analogue format may be a red herring.

        As an outsider to the music industry, I've always assumed that music in online stores and streaming services was encoded from CDs. It seems unlikely that the musicians, producers or recording engineers would be involved in the encoding--with obvious exceptions such as Myspace or Triple J. For Amazon.com, Itunes, Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody and the like I assume that the process involves automation and low-paid labourers. Am I wrong?

        • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 16 2017, @02:15AM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @02:15AM (#510352) Journal

          Once again, I'm not arguing that analog is actually the issue in TFA here: that's my point. The article appears to have been written by someone who wants to complain about digital compression but makes a reference to "analog" for the artists' "intentions," when the reality is that the vast majority of recordings today are on original digital masters, even older ones that have (for all popular albums) by now been digitally remastered. As someone who has heard self-proclaimed audiophiles extol the virtues of "analog" for decades, this reference was amusing to me because there seems to be no suggestion of digging up LPs in TFA, just listening to uncompressed digital audio... Which is obviously not analog.

          The last paragraph of my original comment was not about MP3s, just amusement at audiophile speak.