“This book is valuable for anyone thinking about music in our society, and by extension, the production, dissemination and political economy of any digital arts.” - Mike Mosher, Leonardo Reviews his study shows the importance of continuities and the cross-referencing of media formats, offering a fresh entry point in the histories of sound and communications as well as of digital technologies.” - Hillegonda Rietveld, Times Higher Education “The insights offered here are not only of interest to the study of sound and music but reach beyond to the theorisation of digital media technologies and the understanding of how communication formats develop. A sequel of sorts to 2003's The Audible Past, which offered a history of listening between the stethoscope and the gramophone MP3 brings the story up to the present day, taking in information theory, architectural acoustics, and the vocoder along the way, before finally settling down to the development of the MPEG standard itself and some of the more philosophical implications thrown up by it.” - Robert Barry, Review 31 “Jonathan Sterne's MP3 traces the sonic genealogy of the much-maligned format from its roots in AT&T's drive to maximise profits by squeezing as many calls as possible into a given phone line, eking out the implications of each stage along the way.
Sterne provides plenty.” - Elias Leight, Paste “In a world where debates often come simplified and binary-MP3s are destroying the music industry or freeing it, ruining the purpose and sound of music or opening it to new opportunities-why not welcome a more complex understanding of complex issues? Context is crucial. Along the way, we're taken on fascinating detours through the invention of perceptual coding, the construction (and critique) of the ideal hearing subject, international corporate debates, and an extended discussion over whether or not music should be considered a ‘thing.’ All file formats should be so lucky.” - Nick Murray, Village Voice Instead, it told the story of MP3, the digital audio standard that author and communications professor Jonathan Sterne traces from early-20th-century telephone research up through contemporary debates over piracy and file-sharing. “As it turned out, the most rewarding music book of 2012 wasn't about an artist, a genre, or (thank the lord) the glory days of punk. He demonstrates that formats, standards, and infrastructures-and the need for content to fit inside them-are every bit as central to communication as the boxes we call "media." Taking the history of compression as his point of departure, Jonathan Sterne investigates the relationships among sound, silence, sense, and noise the commodity status of recorded sound and the economic role of piracy and the importance of standards in the governance of our emerging media culture. Although media history is often characterized as a progression toward greater definition, fidelity, and truthfulness, MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates the crucial role of compression in the development of modern media and sound culture. MP3s are products of compression, a process that removes sounds unlikely to be heard from recordings. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s. MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Labor and Working-Class History Association.Association for Middle East Women's Studies.Author Resources from University Presses.Journals fulfilled by DUP Journal Services.
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