Perhaps not many people know that in 1992 a silent and unstoppable revolution of digital audio began for mass, until then essentially represented by CD-Audio. This was, in fact, the year that the algorithm underlying the MP3 format was born by the Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen (IIS).
Part of a European research project called EUREKA, which started in 1987 and ended in 1994, the then-MPEG 1 Layer 3 was one of the most important and mature fruits in the field of psychoacoustic compression algorithms. This family of compression algorithms, whose first studies date back to 1979 by Manfred R. Schroeder, German physicist at AT & T-Bell Labsc, aims to reduce the amount of information capable of describing an audio sequence, from the assumption that the human ear, fortunately for us, is not perfect. The basic idea is to exploit the inability of the man’s auditory system to recognize certain sounds and frequencies, when they are masked by others.
Audio masking is detected at two levels: frequency and temporal masking. To explain the principle quickly, let’s take an example: in the presence of two tones, depending on their frequency and intensity, our ears will be able to recognize both or only one.
In the latter case, we have a frequency masking, and therefore information related to the least audible tone can be discarded. What happens, however, if the most intense tone is lost? It will happen that the tone that was not noticed before, will now return to the foreground. However, for the hearing system to notice, time will inevitably pass, because the membrane needs to stop vibrating and readjust.
We speak, of course, of times in the order of milliseconds, which are however precious, because the sound that falls within this time will be cut by the compression algorithm and, consequently, will help to reduce the amount of information necessary to describe what is audible.
The first MP3 encoder, called l3enc, was released by the Fraunhofer Society on July 7, 1994, while the MP3 extension was officially born on July 15 of the following year.
Those who lived through this time know that we are talking about years in which ADSL did not exist, hard drives were a few hundred MB in size, and in general, both from the point of view of communications and data storage, the figures they were far from being as generous as they are today. With these limitations in mind, I want to remind you that an uncompressed audio file in PCM WAV format, with a resolution of 44 kHz and 16 bits, stereo, as required by the CD-Audio standard, has a bit rate equal to 1411.2 kbit / s. This means that if you want to rip a song from an audio CD on your hard drive, the occupied space in uncompressed WAV format is approximately 10MB per minute. Today perhaps it would not be a problem to have this space, but in the mid-nineties it was a notable limitation.
The compactness of the MP3 format combined with the more than acceptable quality (a very optimistic estimate is a bit rate of 128 kbit / s to obtain a quality comparable to CD-Audio), made it in a few years the vehicle of transmission par excellence for music. The milestones that contributed to this unstoppable technological success were the launch of the Winamp player software by Nullsoft in 1997, and the arrival on the market just one year after the first portable media players: the MPMan F10 from Eiger Labs and the Rio PMP300 from Diamond. Multimedia.
Finally, it is impossible not to mention the birth of peer-to-peer networks aimed at exchanging MP3 files with Napster, one of the most famous applications in history, both for the innovative service that was made accessible and for the inevitable judicial events that followed and which decreed its closure in 2001.
In the same year, another symbol of the multimedia revolution, the result of the same technological horizon drawn by the MP3 format, appeared on the market: the Apple iPod.
Continuing until today we find, in parallel with the birth of new and more efficient compression formats, increasingly evident examples of the revolution, also social and commercial, that led to the arrival of the MP3 format.
There was a time when playlists were decided exclusively by record companies that were mixed into albums with mediocre songs, greatest hits; Today you can create your favorite playlist, selecting the songs and the order of play without any difficulty.
