How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

By stripping out the unnecessary (because they were unheard) noises in a sound file, music files could be made much smaller. Most music was easily compressed and a listener was none the wiser. “That’s an undergraduate project,” says Karlheinz Brandenburg, the Fraunhofer researcher who is called the “father” of the MP3.24 But the human voice was far trickier. It turned out that the key to mastering the nuances of human singing was an obscure a cappella recording of a minor hit from the 1980s, Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” Brandenburg successfully tweaked the MP3’s compression algorithm by listening to “I am sitting / In the morning / At the diner / On the corner . . .” over and over again, maybe 10,000 times, before he got it right. “To get it to the level that it’s really perfect, or near-perfect, for everything,” says Brandenburg, “that was work.”