Mp3

One of the defining cultural shifts of our era has been the startlingly rapid dissolution of the particular notion of intellectual property that shaped popular culture for most of the twentieth century. And perhaps no single element, aside from the Internet, did as much to challenge that notion as did the MP3 (short for MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III), the dominant format for the online distribution of digitally encoded sound. But rather than characterize the MP3 as a radical incursion, Jonathan Sterne's MP3 argues that it is a natural result of a complex, century-long history of relationships between technology, profit, and the study of auditory perception. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic research, Sterne elegantly connects detailed microanalyses of significant moments in this history with insightful reflections on their collective philosophical implications. The questions that the MP3 raises are most effectively addressed, he suggests, with an interdisciplinary approach that focuses on the format itself, rather than on its content or the way it has been used. This strategy allows him to trace the MP3's conceptual evolution back through the Moving Picture Experts Group of the 1980s (from which the mpeg standard takes its name) and ultimately to AT&T's Bell Labs, the institutional agenda of which shaped the most significant psychoacoustic research of the mid-twentieth century. Sterne's contention—essentially that the MP3 format is best understood as a modern manifestation of corporate ideologies forged long ago—sets up a valuable counterpoint to the common assumption that file sharing is intrinsically opposed to capitalism. “In addition to the MP3's patent holders,” he notes, purveyors of storage media, playback devices (including a wide range of consumer electronics), and broadband internet have profited handsomely from mass piracy. Unauthorized duplication and circulation have certainly deflated the profitability of recordings, but they are not the antimarket practices we have been led to believe. (p. 28

Art · Aside · Counterpoint · Epistemology · Ideology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy