There’s one internet invention you might very well use every day that – shocker – did not come from Silicon Valley, but the hills of northern Bavaria.
The technology in question is the MP3 format for music, which was developed by computer programmers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in the early 1990s in an effort to create a format for music that was of good enough quality to be transmitted along phone lines.
But it only got its name exactly 20 years ago: MP3, which is a lot easier to remember than its technical designation, ISO Standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3.
The trick the programmers pulled was to compress audio data in such a way that the file took up significantly less space than earlier versions. That led the way for the creation of the iPod, the sidelining of cassettes and CDs and a complete overhaul for the music industry.
“It is the dream of every scientist to develop something useful for humanity,” says Karlheinz Brandenburg, an electrical engineer and mathematician who worked on the MP3 compression technology along with colleagues Harald Popp and Bernhard Grill.
“Back then, we were dreaming of digital radio and millions of users. Now there are billions of devices that work with the format.”
However, there was a long period after the team made the breakthrough when they were not sure if there would be a market for MP3s.
Pessimists asked if there would ever be devices that could be used to carry around a digitised music collection.
And a lot did not go according to plan. For example, the encoding software for converting music into MP3s was supposed to be sold for a high price to raise money. Instead, an Australian student purchased a copy in 1997, reverse-engineered it and then made the encoder software freely available online.
From then on, any CD could quickly be converted into MP3s, and those files weren’t too large to be sent along the existing internet connections of the time.
The first MP3 player appeared in stores in 1998. But the technology didn’t really take off until the head of Apple, Steve Jobs, brought the iPod to market in 2001. Now smartphones are the main technology for playing MP3s.
It was a huge change for music fans, who could now take their collections on the road.
But there were downsides to the MP3. Because it was easier to send and copy music, it wasn’t long before people were trading (usually illegally) up to 2 billion songs a month. The problem reached a head with the advent of the music exchange site Napster in 1999.
And some aficionados say the compression technology hurts the sound quality because cutting it down to size means doing away with some parts of the sound spectrum and shrinking the frequency range for each song.
That’s because the creators made the MP3 with a focus on human hearing. Only the sounds that are easy to hear by humans make the cut.
And now, after 20 years in the sun, MP3 compression technology might be seeing its time pass, since many popular music streaming services don’t rely on hard drive space, but bandwidth, allowing the music to be pulled from the internet. But that doesn’t mean the Fraunhofer Institute’s discovery has no role to play here.
“MP3 isn’t just about music on the PC,” says Grill. More to the point, it’s a standard for music everywhere. “Even today, there are probably tens of thousands of streaming services active with MP3.”
Given that bandwidth will become ever more available, experts ask what kind of future MP3 has. But music fans can be sure their collections won’t become obsolete anytime soon. Grill prophesies that today’s MP3s will still be playable in 100 years. – DPA