The Lost Sounds of Modern Music
Nowadays a lot of music is in digital format. One of the most popular digital encoding methods is MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, aka. “MP3“. Typically an MP3 file takes around 1/10 the size of the uncompressed original (depending on quality), thereby saving storage space.
MP3 uses a form of lossy compression. This means that the original sound can not be perfectly recovered. What is recovered (sound you hear) is some kind of approximation of the original.
MP3 does this lossy compression by removing the sounds which a human ear cannot distinguish, using so-called “perceptual coding“. The sounds which are removed are specified by a psychoacoustic model, which is created using human input, for example listening tests.
In other words, this means that many people are all the time listening to music with “something missing”. But what is this something, what does this something sound like?
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