The MP3 format has been with us for years and still holds its place as the standard in music distribution. Users have always known that MP3 applies lossy compression, leading to a trade-off between quality and size. Ryan Maguire, a student at the University of Virginia, decided to develop a method to listen to and visualize all that material lost in compression. The result is called moDernisT.
You don't have to search far on the Web to find dozens of articles criticizing the MP3 format. Of course, none of those articles attacks its main benefit — reducing the original WAV file size by ten to eleven times — but rather the product of compression. Theoretically, what MP3 “clips” is not perceived by the human ear, but along the way we have encountered several MP3s with dreadful sound. Audiophiles, mathematicians, and other compression experts have said on more than one occasion that MP3 “does” sacrifice material perceptible to the human ear. The problem is that these statements aren't enough. There are also those who argue that it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between an MP3 at 320 kilobits per second and a FLAC file, so continuing the discussion makes no sense.
The moDernisT Project
However, the work of Ryan Maguire from the University of Virginia makes the discussion about the MP3 format worthy of broader attention. On his official blog The Ghost in the MP3, Maguire published a video called moDernisT, which reproduces a composition based on the material discarded during the compression of Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner.” The choice of “Tom’s Diner” is no coincidence, as it is the “reference song” that Karlheinz Brandenburg used during the development of the MP3 compression format. Maguire emphasizes that moDernisT keeps the song's structure relatively intact, but what we hear are nothing more than the leftovers. The video — which is also part of “Tom’s Diner” — adopts a similar approach, reproducing everything that MP4 compression rejected (I assume he means H.264).
Although moDernisT has a marked artistic profile, it makes us wonder why the format remains unbeatable on our computers and mobile devices. Storage capacity and connection speeds have increased enough to make downloading a WAV file of 40 or 50 megabytes a trivial task. The benefits of MP3 have eroded almost completely, and if compression is done hastily, it can sound quite bad. Personally, I believe MP3 shares a condition similar to that of the animated GIF, which also hasn't lost popularity over time.
