The mp3 as cultural artifact

Abstract

The mp3 lies at the center of important debates around intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a cultural artifact in its own right. This article examines the design of the mp3 from both industrial and psychoacoustic perspectives to explain better why mp3s are so easy to exchange and the auditory dimensions of that process of exchange. As a container technology for recorded sound, the mp3 shows that the quality of ‘portability’ is central to the history of auditory representation. As a psychoacoustic technology that literally plays its listeners, the mp3 shows that digital audio culture works according to logics somewhat distinct from digital visual culture.

Sharing sound: teaching, learning, and researching sonic skills

“…41 More contemporary CDs, YouTube videos, mp3 files and websites extend the idea of self-practice, personalizing learning situations and incorporating everyday sound media practices. 42 Certainly these recordings represent different sensorial experiences than those offered at the bedside, but this is not to say that the recordings ignore the use of tools or the professional environment of the skill. instructions of a 1970s sound recording illustrate the attempt to simulate a more complete bodily experience: in order to preserve realism this recording has been prepared such that faithful, life-like reproduction will be achieved only if you listen to the cassette with a stethoscope.…”

Context-based Sound and the Ecological Theory of Perception

“…v Jonathan Sterne's (2006) work on the mp3 file format suggests that the success of the mp3's compression codec is due to its use of 'perceptual coding': the discarding of frequencies that are not regarded as necessary for audition by the average listener. This is coupled to the question of what is 'acceptable' quality for the music consumer, given the largely casual forms of listening (via iPods, smart phones, laptops and so on) that are a feature of the mp3's success as an 'artifact' for the distribution and consumption of music.…”

Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)

“…The digital music file may or may not be an artefact (Sterne, 2006), but it just doesn't feel like an object containing the creative skills of musicians: a repository of the time and effort spent on composing, performing, and producing. It is not that tangible, fetishized, ritualistically revered phonographic object (Eisenberg, 1988), with album artwork, lyrics set out as poetry and explanatory liner notes-which is perhaps why vinyl is enjoying a resurgence.…”