MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne (review)

“The MP3 is the most common form in which recorded sound is available today,” Jonathan Sterne says early on in this kaleidoscopic work (p. 1). It is “ubiquitous and banal” (p. 2), a technology that has remained remarkably unexamined outside of its effect on the music industry (generally bad) and consumer electronics (quite good). To the average person, the story of the MP3 might start with Napster, or perhaps with the Diamond Rio, the illfated iPod predecessor that debuted in 1998. Maybe the story stretches back a little further, to the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, when the format was first developed. Few would think to begin the MP3’s story with nineteenth-century innovations in telephony or early-twentieth-century studies of psychoacoustics, but that is precisely what Sterne, an influential scholar of sound studies, does in MP3: The Meaning of a Format.

In fact, the millions of bytes of kraut rock and podcasts in your pocket have the power to recast an entire century and a half of cultural and technological history. MP3 takes the reader on a trip through zoos and labs, from avant-garde music to grisly experiments in which scientists tried to literally plug cats’ brains into telephone systems (decerebrated may be an unwelcome addition to the vocabularies of many readers.) Throughout, Sterne deftly links the institutional history of huge communication systems with breakthroughs in information theory and fundamental choices about the aesthetics and technical specifications of sound recording that continue to shape our experience of music (and aural communication in general) to this very day. His book builds on the seminal work of Paul Edwards in The Closed World (1996); whereas Edwards argued that new ideas about information and cognition emerged from the demands of military research on sound during World War II, Sterne finds the intellectual roots of information theory in earlier studies of telephony.

Indeed, for Sterne, the MP3 is not merely “another in a long line of storage formats,” the successor to the wax cylinder, LP, cassette, and CD (p. 195). He wants us to see compressed audio files not as artifacts of the music business, but as the unintended offspring of attempts to maximize the amount of sound that could flow through telephone wires. “Each major technical iteration of sound recording made use of telephone research,” Sterne says, pointing out that the earliest innovations in sound recording originated in work on telephony and telegraphy, and later breakthroughs in electrical and digital recording resulted from work in AT&T’s Bell Labs (p. 3).

Notably, MP3 offers an instructive history of the format’s origins, and the oddly prosaic institutional processes whereby the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), an international consortium of scientists, engineers, and corporations, established the fundamentals of a new format for compressing sound in the late 1980s. A variety of competing interests, including AT&T, British Telecom, and Sony, had to agree on the parameters of the format—its sound quality and capacity for playback and random access, for instance—in order to create a file that would be compatible with multiple platforms and uses, such as broadcast and cable distribution. The MPEG deliberations were dominated by concerns about broadcasting, not recording, and few imagined that the MP3 would become a means of widespread, peer-to-peer sharing at a time when the internet remained little known and poorly understood.

The book does fall short in a few places. While the author insists that standards-making is about political struggle, his account of these negotiations does not show a great deal of friction or conflict. The chapter might have benefited from a more personal and specific narrative of how engineers and businesspeople forged the compromises that resulted in the MP3 format. The author also has a habit of dropping unattributed quotations into the text, making it difficult for a reader to contextualize the statements without flipping to the endnotes (p. 48). These quibbles are, however, minor flaws...