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