Pushkin. A few years ago, I was thinking a lot about ghosts and music. I was writing a novel called White Tears, about two young music producers who fake in nineteen twenties blues record and put it out on the Internet, pretending it's the work of a long forgotten musician. Gradually they realized that something horrible that's coming towards them out of the past. While I was writing, I'd spend hours every day listening to recordings made in the years after the First World War. The characters in my novel strained to hear the sounds of long dead singers and guitarists emerging out of the crack and hiss. When you put the needle down on a record or press play on a sound file, you're inviting a ghost into your room. You're inviting a ghost into your head, into the acoustic space between your ears. I'm not speaking to you now right here on this podcast. I'm not here at all. I'm speaking to you from the past. And what if mine now, as I talk into a microphone in my rigged up COVID recording studio, isn't just splintered off from yours by a few weeks or months what if mine now is fifty years into your past, or ninety or a hundred. Am I dead? Or am I alive? Maybe I'm dead, but am I alive? For you? I would sit and think about recording and time as I wrote my novel with a pair of big clothes back headphones clamped over my ears. Late one night, I ran across this. Maybe as you hear it now in your now, it sounds familiar. Maybe it sounds like something you ought to recognize. It certainly tugged at my memory when I heard it, like pulling on a thread. The best way I had to think about this music was that it sounded like the outside of something, something that wasn't there, like a cast on a phantom limb, or an empty mold for a statue, a vacancy. I was hearing the absence of something. This music reminded me of a record that had scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. It was what they used to call a flexi disc, a sheet of thin plastic that came mounted to the cover of a magazine called The Unexplained. On it were what were portentously called electronic voice phenomena. Supposedly the sounds of dead people picked up by various kinds of modern audio equipment. The experimental states that, in his opinion, man cannot grasp the events after death with his intellect or even with his intuition. A voice replies in German air can This is into the Zone, a podcast devoted to the opposites that shape our world and how borders are never as clearly defined as we think. I'm hurry, Kunzru. This episode is about something that's fascinated me since I heard those voices on the Flexi disc, the ghosts inside technology and how they haunt us through signal and noise. He can, and we're going to get to signal and noise via a place that at first might not seem very promising. A conference in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight, Hanover Landshah Yes, Hanover, the thirteenth largest city in Germany. Hanovers a nineteen eighty eight meeting of the Moving Picture Expert screw Up, an organization founded to establish industry wide standards for audio and video compression. This is Henover to set the scene here in nineteen eighty eight, The coolest office technology is the facts. Steve Jobs has been fired from Apple for failing to beat IBM in the race to develop a personal computer, and Microsoft has released an updated version of something called Windows, which is widely considered a dud. Your uncle has a new hobby at family parties, videotaping everything on his camcorder. The world of music is dominated by one futuristic format, the compact disc. Some four hundred million CDs will be pressed in nineteen eighty eight. You can even get a CD walkman, though a cassette tape walkman is still much better for jogging. CD's skip if you move them around too much. The audio engineers at the hand of a meeting are there to hammer out a standard for digital audio, and they're haunted by one recent disaster, the video format Wars, in which two versions of the same thing went head to head in the marketplace, Betamax versus VHS, both chunky plastic shells around spools of magnetic tape. With the Betamax at your command, you'll never again be deprived of watching whatever program you desire at your convenience. You'll be free of the restrictions of time. Its uses are defined only by the limits of your imagination. But while you might be free of the restrictions of time. The beta max wasn't it could only record for one hour, but VHS tapes could record two hours, long enough for movies that could be rented from video stores, providing employment for slackers, stoners and pornographers around the world. So VHS one. But the format wars caused both sides to hemorrhage cash. When it came to audio, no one wanted to risk a repeat of that way too stressful. Far better to work out a standard. Yes, whole technical should be. I will stop you if I think you're getting too technical. How about that? Standardization almost by definition, is not something that attracts mavericks or loaners. If you're a cowboy or a romantic, go elsewhere with your horses and your melodrama. Standardization is a calling for people who want to get along, people who like to agree on how to do something. People who like to make sure that if a thing is going to be done, it's done in the best possible way, exactly the same by everyone, with no argument, People like Karl Heinz Brandenburg. Psych Acoustics is the science merely off aring and viewing or ears and brain subleck box in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight, Karl Heinz led one of the fourteen teams who had competing proposals for an audio compression standard. All sorts of companies were interested in audio compression. TV and radio stations, telecoms, manufacturers of consumer electronics, governments. Karl Hines had started his career trying to improve the sound of telephone conversations. Now he was leading a consortium of companies from several countries trying to make their CODEC the Chosen One. CODEC, by the way, is short for CODA decoder. These days, a CODEC is just a piece of software. Back in nineteen eighty eight, most people thought the winning audio compression CODEC would end up as some kind of box, a piece of electronic equipment that would be bought by labs and recording studios. I'm a fan of people like Karl Heinz, engineers who can work through problems and build things to solve them. This is partly because I'm not one of life's standardizers. I like to make things up as I go along. When I'm cooking, I'm the kind of cook who throws stuff in the pan eyeballing quantities. You know what I'm saying, yet without technical standards, most of the things I do other than cooking, I couldn't do. I couldn't record this podcast. You couldn't download it or stream it over the internet. The internet only works. The Internet could only work because everyone agrees to do something very complicated in exactly the same way as a species. We can't agree about anything, and yet we've agreed on that. It's incredible. The way humans perceive sound is also very complicated, as Karl heines Well knows. Would you explain a little about the mechanics of how the ear registers sound and transmits it to the brain yep. Of course there are short and long versions of set explanations. Maybe a quite short version please, okay. So, as you know, sound enters the pinner and the ear canal to the ear drum. Then we got the so called middle ears, ear drums, the arsicles, and then to the inner ear and on. In the inner ear we have the so called cochlera, which is a little thing. It is actually quite a long explanation. Karl Heinz goes on to talk about how tiny hairs in the cochlear are connected to neurons, which detects sound. Waves and send signals to the brain. This structure, which changes sound into electrical energy, goes by the name the organ of Corty. This would also be my band name, were it not already taken by a trio who describe themselves on bandcamp dot com as blues rock with an experimental edge. The actual organ of Corti in our heads functions as a kind of spectrum analyzer, separating sounds into different frequencies and telling the brain how strong each one is. So when you're trying to compress audio, when you're trying to work out what to keep and what can be removed, what you're trying to do is to use these limitations of the human ear to work out what parts of the signal can be removed. Is that correct? That's correct? In fact, a very simple way to phase it is that we try to store only that amount of information which goes from the inner ear to the brain. Karl Heinz explains that the organ of Corti can only handle so much information. Not every frequency that comes into the ear gets perceived by the brain. If there's an additional sound a's the same frequency, it doesn't change the pattern of moving hairselfs anymore, it doesn't change as a nurine firing. So the other signal, which is fainter, gets masked as we call it, right, So this is this is masking one of the key things that you're looking for when you're you're trying to work out what to keep and what to throw away. Exactly what to keep and what to throw away? This was the great technical question facing the audio engineers in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight. What they wanted to build was the very best and most efficient way to encode sound, one format used by everyone. It had to sound good, obviously, but it also had to be small because, just like our brains, phone lines or radio waves can only handle so much sound information at once. Therefore, it's good to throw away as much as possible. If one sound is masked by another, great just get rid of it. Being engineers, the engineers in Hanover had a very complicated formula for testing the competing proposals. The winner would need to be efficient and small, it would need to be simple to encode things and play them back, and of course it would have to sound good. But what does sound good mean? The engineers weren't just reading off numbers on a chart to find out what sounded best. They compare different compression algorithms by listening souls of final judgment was always listening tests. So what were the testers listening to? For quite some time as the task was to find difficult pieces of music because the very first attempts to do music compression already worked quite nicely for some signals and sounded horrible for us us. I had Glockenspiel as one early example of sounding horrible. What was easy easy was dance music, like if you had a full symphony orchestra or pop group which lots of sounds, that was easier. So it's when sounds are very distinct that it's easy to hear the limits of the compression. Is that correct? Correct? And one of the most difficult was Susan Vega's voice in her Solitude Standing appena piece Tom's Diner. It's a track on Suzanne vegas album Solitude Standing. Back in nineteen eighty seven. When the album was released, it became the epitome of a certain sort of unthreatening, good taste, yuppie dinner party music. Solitude Standing was the kind of record that people with new CD players would buy to showcase the performance of their high fire systems. This album went platinum in the US, and it was even more popular in Europe, so it's not surprising that a CD of Solitude Standing was floating around in some European lab where engineers were obsessing over digital audio standards. So Carl Hines and his colleagues compressed and listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega. They also listened to Tracy Chapman, Haydn, and Ornette Coleman. He might ask why they didn't test their system on even more varieties of music. Well, because it took eight hours to digitize just twenty seconds of sound. The song Tom's Diner alone is two minutes and nine seconds long. That would take more than two days of processing. So they used tiny snippets twenty seconds long and played them again and again and again. We tried it and it sounded horrible, really horrible. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner, and this simple sound of a woman's voice turned out to be one of the hardest to get right. The problem was worst with Vega's vowels. When she sang, she distributed sound energy all across the audio spectrum. The algorithm was designed to make a kind of trade off. It could get one aspect of the sound perfect, but another would be sketchy. Finally they worked out a fix and those Doo doodoo started to sound pretty good. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner, I am waiting at the counter. The problem was when the scores came in at a later meeting, no one could actually decide which of the fourteen competitors sounded best. The story of how it exactly went down is byzantine and technical. All you really need to know is that the process got bad tempered, and finally there was a compromise. At the hand of a conference, it had been decided the audio standard would have three different layers. Not three different standards, Oh no, not three different things. Layers like a cake, a nice tasty cake. And one of the three winners was the version developed by Karl Heinz. Its official name was Motion Picture Expert Group one Audio Layer Number three, or as it came to be known, the MP three, and the music industry would never be the same as Karl Heinz Brandenburg shook ends and was congratulated for his work on audio compression he had no idea what he had unleashed. He and his employer, a research lab called Fraunhofer, just wanted to sell some boxes of high end electronics to recording studios. We sought physical boxes and we licensed to companies how to build these physical boxes. But this was for professional use. We had software out there. And then some young guy from Australia used a Stone credit card number to buy one of these professional encoders. So he just built his own user interface, put our encoding library into it, put everything to GASA, and he told everybody to take off the software off their FTP sides. But of course knows this has been the same until now. In the Internet, you can't get things removed. It's still somewhere by now. It was nineteen ninety seven. The hacker eventually got arrested and the MP three eight the music industry. Within a few years, it had almost destroyed the compact disc. It cannibalized record company profits and made it harder for musicians to earn a living. In nineteen ninety nine, MP three surpassed sex as the most searched word on the Internet. By the late nineties, music was being pumped into our brains like a fire hose. Music fans like me could collect more than we could ever listen to. So much music. Of course, the technology was not without its critics. Do you know who you are? Metallica? I love and everything you do, except for that bad show your host of. You know what, maybe I wouldn't have to horn myself out if your kids didn't steal my music. So that's Marlon Wayne's and Lars Ulric doing a skit at the MTV Video Music Awards in two thousand. To me, the most interesting thing about the creation of the MP three isn't the story of Napster or the iPod or whatever. It's about what got kept and what got thrown away. If you're compressing a song down to ten percent of its original size, then what do you get rid of? Karl Heinz's MP three algorithm separates sound into two parts, the wheat and the chaff. The idea that such a decision could be subjective is displeasing to him, But I wonder can it really be objective? How do you tell information from noise? And what exactly is information? Is there like a living room or somewhere a little bit more away from drill we could probably do with the marking, and I'm really sorry about Let's try. There's a room. Yeah down here, let's see if that's the sound of me, My producers Hunter and Rider, and the science writer James Glick, trying to find somewhere quiet to talk in his apartment slightly. In nineteen eighty seven, James wrote a book called Chaos, all about the mathematical discovery of so called chaos theory. Oddly for a book about math, Chaos was something of a countercultural classic in nineties Britain. People skinned up joints on its cover, sitting under psychedelic posters of Mandelbrot sets and talking about the butterfly effect before their pills came on and they headed out into the fields to make crop circles. I don't know if James knows about his impact on the rave Ea and anyway, it's not really what I've come to talk to him about. It's louder here, it feels happy. Yeah, let's just go back to the kitchen table and we'll work with what we got. Someone somewhere in James's building is renovating. He says it could be several flaws away, but because of the acoustics. The sound of power tools is audible wherever we go. It is I suppose a sort of cosmic joke that we can't talk without noise getting onto the recording, because I've come to talk to him about noise, or rather about the difference between signal a noise. This binary opposition is at the core of the modern idea of information, and James has written a book about it, called The Information A History a Theory Flood. It's obviously an old word information, and you can look it up in the OED and it goes back many centuries, but it wasn't the kind of word it is now. It wasn't a common word, and it didn't refer to the stuff that we think of as information, the whole collection of sounds, words, images, types of knowledge that are encoded biologically. We understand information as a gigantic and extremely important category of stuff for us, and that began, I argue at a very specific moment of time. On the notes I wrote to prepare for this interview, one name appears again and again. Claude Shannon. He was a scientist who first introduced the idea that information was something you could measure. He published his Mathematical Theory of communication in nineteen forty eight, the first time he defines information the way a scientist needs to define it as a thing that you can measure. There's a unit of measure for information, and we all know what that is. It's the bit yes or no, on or off, zero or one, a very precise thing. Before that, the idea of measuring information didn't make any sense. It was like, could you have a scientific unit of measure for happiness or for anxiety or for fog? And then once you've got them in bits, you have something that applies to everything else. You can start to say how many bits are there in a book? How many bits of information are there in that painting? Does that? Is that a question that makes sense? As a writer, I think of myself as someone who deals with information that when I use that word, I'm not speaking in the mathematical terms of Claude Shannon. I'm someone who deals with meaning. I'm trying to make this podcast as meaningful as I can. When I do that, I think of it as being rich in information. But for Claude Shannon, it wasn't like that at all. Information had nothing to do with meaning. It is counterintuitive. It seems to us that if we start to talk about informa nation, apart from meaning you're you're talking about noise again. And Shannon's contemporaries also found this difficult to grasp, so he had to really emphasize that. He had to say again and again that the content of a message was irrelevant to the kind of mathematical treatment he was creating. He was measuring the bit content of a given message, and that bit content didn't depend on whether the message was crucially important or whether it was just a lot of nonsense. Can you just say the thing about this thing? There is my sentence about the signal and information again, and there's a bus that drove by. Oh, but what was it the signal? Give me a little more these interruptions demonstrating what we're talking about. Is the bus passing outside signal or noise? Could it be both? I found myself when I was thinking about this question working on the book, thinking about particular pieces of music like a Bach prelude. I mean, I'm thinking particularly of the first one in C major, yeah, which you know is on the Voyager Golden Records that's making its way to to other galaxies. Because Carl Sagan and his committee thought it would reveal something about us as human beings. Well this, you ask yourself, how much information is in this bach prelude? You play it, and the first thing you notice is it's very repetitious. It's the same thing over and over again, except that it keeps changing a little bit. And if you were Claude Shannon, you would say, well, I could compress this algorithmically, because all I really need is the changes. The stuff that repeats itself is not new information. And as a listener, you also recognize the tension between these two things. You recognize that if it's the patterns that you sense that make it beautiful, and it's also the fact that the patterns do not repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful. Claude Shannon's revelation was that information is a measure of complexity, so you can assign it a number. But being complex is not the same as being meaningful. Things can be complex and meaningless, as anyone alive in twenty twenty can attest. When it comes to sounding good, let alone esthetic beauty. It's not about information. Shannon leaves us cold. He leaves us empty for exactly that reason that he tried to remove the human element from the equation, he explicitly removed meaning from the equation. And meaning is what we want. Meaning is what we are desperate for, So how do we find it? Meaning is what we're desperate for? And James Blick's main question is how do we find it? I've always thought of meaning as something you make, for example, through words and stories, but maybe meaning is now something we have to reclaim from our algorithms. The listening test for the MP three were done in Germany, and so they were predominantly engineers, and I think mostly white, uh, sort of German men, professional, sort of audio professionals. This is Ryan McGuire, a composer based in Chicago. It was his ghostly music that I found on the Internet a few years ago while I was writing my novel White Tears. His music is what led me down the rabbit hole of audio compression and the MP three. Ryan's obsessed with the early listening tests that led to the MP three, all those German engineer is with the CDs. I don't think it was particularly systematic, but the songs for the MP three listening tests, the early MP three listening tests, you can tell that they were trying to have a sort of breadth of material. So you have Tom Steiner by Susan Vega, which you know, solo, unaccompanied a cappella vocal. Then you have sort of an acoustic pop song, fast Car by Tracy Chapman. You have a trumpet excerpt from Hyden's Trumpet Concerto, and you have surprisingly, you have an excerpt from Ornette Coleman's in All Languages, so you have even some jazz. The remaining songs were sort of test audio files. There was one of a cloud and a couple of others, so it doesn't sound like there there's anything with complicated percussion or a lot of bass. Those would both be things that I would I would have thought might be quite difficult for a coding system to handle. You're exactly right. Obviously, all of those recordings are major label recordings done to sort of high fidelity standards. You know, they didn't test any punk records. There's no hip hop or like dance music or something that has a lot of emphasis on base. There's not a lot of the grittiness that many listeners value in rock and roll or blues. That raw feeling there is sort of a tension there between different esthetic value systems. Would it be too much to say that their MP three would be different if different people had been in the listening tests and different music had been chosen to test with. No, I don't think that's too much to say. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee. And it's still hard to remember when you're humming along to Tom's Diner, enjoying the intimacy of Susanne Vega's voice, that it's totally reconstructed. This is an MP three, a thing made out of code. It's an artifact produced according to a set of technical and esthetic specifications by a group of audio engineers. And I look the other way as they are kissing their hellos and unpretending not to see them, and instead I pour the milk. Audio compression exists at the border where objective perception becomes subjective taste. It's where the physics of sound shades into what sounds good to a particular person with their own likes and dislikes and a particular, culturally defined idea of what good sounds, sounds like. What gets kept is simple, it becomes the MP three of Tom's Diner. But what happens to the rest the parts that get thrown away? Ryan wanted to hear those parts, so he said about rescuing them from oblivion. He wanted to hear what kind of music he could make from the scraps. If you've ever compressed something made an MP three yourself, there are a range of different settings, so you can set the bit rate and you can decide how their stereo encoding has done. I started by just compressing Tom's Diner in as you know, in all the different ways that I could, and comparing, you know, listening to the differences how they sounded, and then inverting them basically measuring them against the original uncompressed audio and subtracting and finding the difference, finding you know, what was left out when it went down to this compressed form. The material that I found most interesting ended up being, you know, when you had the highest quality MP three compression settings, that lost material was very sort of whispy, spectral and just yeah, very evocative. In Ryan's music, we hear the shape of something that's not there. It's everything we don't hear in the MP three version of the song, the version that pops up instantly when we click on the track and pipe pit into our organs of Corty. So much has been left behind. There's always someone doing the listening you on your commute or folding your laundry, listening to me speaking in to a microphone, conveying information out of the past. I sound good to you or I don't. Maybe you feel like something's lost, something just out of reach. It is always nice to see you, says though man behind the counter to the woman who has come in. She is shaking her umbrella, and I look the other way as they are kissing their hellos and unpretending not to see them, and instead I pour the milk. I open up the paper. There's a story of an actor who had died while he was drinking. It was no one I had heard of. And I'm turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies when I'm feeling someone watching me, and so I raised my head. There's a woman on the outside looking inside as she see me. No, she does not really see me, because she sees her own reflection. And I'm trying not to notice that she's hitching up her skirt and while she's straightening her stockings, her hair has gotten wet. Oh, this rain, it will continue through the morning. As I'm listening to the bells of the cathedral, I am thinking of your voice and of the midnight picnic once upon a time before the rain began, and I finished up my coffee and it's time to catch the train. Here trapped inside my MP three, I find strange memories coming to the four and other people's strange memories too. We had live animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats, crickets to stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his gear for exploding and h and he just was just complete chaos, chaos and art and philosophy from the golden age of cyberspace. That's next time on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Spatial Relations. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti, also known as lip Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review and Spotify playlist of songs that inspired this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at Harry Kunzru. I'm no one I had heard of Harry Kunzru. See you next time.

Pushkin. A few years ago, I was thinking a lot about ghosts and music. I was writing a novel called White Tears, about two young music producers who fake in nineteen twenties blues record and put it out on the Internet, pretending it's the work of a long forgotten musician. Gradually they realized that something horrible that's coming towards them out of the past. While I was writing, I'd spend hours every day listening to recordings made in the years after the First World War. The characters in my novel strained to hear the sounds of long dead singers and guitarists emerging out of the crack and hiss. When you put the needle down on a record or press play on a sound file, you're inviting a ghost into your room. You're inviting a ghost into your head, into the acoustic space between your ears. I'm not speaking to you now right here on this podcast. I'm not here at all. I'm speaking to you from the past. And what if mine now, as I talk into a microphone in my rigged up COVID recording studio, isn't just splintered off from yours by a few weeks or months what if mine now is fifty years into your past, or ninety or a hundred. Am I dead? Or am I alive? Maybe I'm dead, but am I alive? For you? I would sit and think about recording and time as I wrote my novel with a pair of big clothes back headphones clamped over my ears. Late one night, I ran across this. Maybe as you hear it now in your now, it sounds familiar. Maybe it sounds like something you ought to recognize. It certainly tugged at my memory when I heard it, like pulling on a thread. The best way I had to think about this music was that it sounded like the outside of something, something that wasn't there, like a cast on a phantom limb, or an empty mold for a statue, a vacancy. I was hearing the absence of something. This music reminded me of a record that had scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. It was what they used to call a flexi disc, a sheet of thin plastic that came mounted to the cover of a magazine called The Unexplained. On it were what were portentously called electronic voice phenomena. Supposedly the sounds of dead people picked up by various kinds of modern audio equipment. The experimental states that, in his opinion, man cannot grasp the events after death with his intellect or even with his intuition. A voice replies in German air can This is into the Zone, a podcast devoted to the opposites that shape our world and how borders are never as clearly defined as we think. I'm hurry, Kunzru. This episode is about something that's fascinated me since I heard those voices on the Flexi disc, the ghosts inside technology and how they haunt us through signal and noise. He can, and we're going to get to signal and noise via a place that at first might not seem very promising. A conference in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight, Hanover Landshah Yes, Hanover, the thirteenth largest city in Germany. Hanovers a nineteen eighty eight meeting of the Moving Picture Expert screw Up, an organization founded to establish industry wide standards for audio and video compression. This is Henover to set the scene here in nineteen eighty eight, The coolest office technology is the facts. Steve Jobs has been fired from Apple for failing to beat IBM in the race to develop a personal computer, and Microsoft has released an updated version of something called Windows, which is widely considered a dud. Your uncle has a new hobby at family parties, videotaping everything on his camcorder. The world of music is dominated by one futuristic format, the compact disc. Some four hundred million CDs will be pressed in nineteen eighty eight. You can even get a CD walkman, though a cassette tape walkman is still much better for jogging. CD's skip if you move them around too much. The audio engineers at the hand of a meeting are there to hammer out a standard for digital audio, and they're haunted by one recent disaster, the video format Wars, in which two versions of the same thing went head to head in the marketplace, Betamax versus VHS, both chunky plastic shells around spools of magnetic tape. With the Betamax at your command, you'll never again be deprived of watching whatever program you desire at your convenience. You'll be free of the restrictions of time. Its uses are defined only by the limits of your imagination. But while you might be free of the restrictions of time. The beta max wasn't it could only record for one hour, but VHS tapes could record two hours, long enough for movies that could be rented from video stores, providing employment for slackers, stoners and pornographers around the world. So VHS one. But the format wars caused both sides to hemorrhage cash. When it came to audio, no one wanted to risk a repeat of that way too stressful. Far better to work out a standard. Yes, whole technical should be. I will stop you if I think you're getting too technical. How about that? Standardization almost by definition, is not something that attracts mavericks or loaners. If you're a cowboy or a romantic, go elsewhere with your horses and your melodrama. Standardization is a calling for people who want to get along, people who like to agree on how to do something. People who like to make sure that if a thing is going to be done, it's done in the best possible way, exactly the same by everyone, with no argument, People like Karl Heinz Brandenburg. Psych Acoustics is the science merely off aring and viewing or ears and brain subleck box in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight, Karl Heinz led one of the fourteen teams who had competing proposals for an audio compression standard. All sorts of companies were interested in audio compression. TV and radio stations, telecoms, manufacturers of consumer electronics, governments. Karl Hines had started his career trying to improve the sound of telephone conversations. Now he was leading a consortium of companies from several countries trying to make their CODEC the Chosen One. CODEC, by the way, is short for CODA decoder. These days, a CODEC is just a piece of software. Back in nineteen eighty eight, most people thought the winning audio compression CODEC would end up as some kind of box, a piece of electronic equipment that would be bought by labs and recording studios. I'm a fan of people like Karl Heinz, engineers who can work through problems and build things to solve them. This is partly because I'm not one of life's standardizers. I like to make things up as I go along. When I'm cooking, I'm the kind of cook who throws stuff in the pan eyeballing quantities. You know what I'm saying, yet without technical standards, most of the things I do other than cooking, I couldn't do. I couldn't record this podcast. You couldn't download it or stream it over the internet. The internet only works. The Internet could only work because everyone agrees to do something very complicated in exactly the same way as a species. We can't agree about anything, and yet we've agreed on that. It's incredible. The way humans perceive sound is also very complicated, as Karl heines Well knows. Would you explain a little about the mechanics of how the ear registers sound and transmits it to the brain yep. Of course there are short and long versions of set explanations. Maybe a quite short version please, okay. So, as you know, sound enters the pinner and the ear canal to the ear drum. Then we got the so called middle ears, ear drums, the arsicles, and then to the inner ear and on. In the inner ear we have the so called cochlera, which is a little thing. It is actually quite a long explanation. Karl Heinz goes on to talk about how tiny hairs in the cochlear are connected to neurons, which detects sound. Waves and send signals to the brain. This structure, which changes sound into electrical energy, goes by the name the organ of Corty. This would also be my band name, were it not already taken by a trio who describe themselves on bandcamp dot com as blues rock with an experimental edge. The actual organ of Corti in our heads functions as a kind of spectrum analyzer, separating sounds into different frequencies and telling the brain how strong each one is. So when you're trying to compress audio, when you're trying to work out what to keep and what can be removed, what you're trying to do is to use these limitations of the human ear to work out what parts of the signal can be removed. Is that correct? That's correct? In fact, a very simple way to phase it is that we try to store only that amount of information which goes from the inner ear to the brain. Karl Heinz explains that the organ of Corti can only handle so much information. Not every frequency that comes into the ear gets perceived by the brain. If there's an additional sound a's the same frequency, it doesn't change the pattern of moving hairselfs anymore, it doesn't change as a nurine firing. So the other signal, which is fainter, gets masked as we call it, right, So this is this is masking one of the key things that you're looking for when you're you're trying to work out what to keep and what to throw away. Exactly what to keep and what to throw away? This was the great technical question facing the audio engineers in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight. What they wanted to build was the very best and most efficient way to encode sound, one format used by everyone. It had to sound good, obviously, but it also had to be small because, just like our brains, phone lines or radio waves can only handle so much sound information at once. Therefore, it's good to throw away as much as possible. If one sound is masked by another, great just get rid of it. Being engineers, the engineers in Hanover had a very complicated formula for testing the competing proposals. The winner would need to be efficient and small, it would need to be simple to encode things and play them back, and of course it would have to sound good. But what does sound good mean? The engineers weren't just reading off numbers on a chart to find out what sounded best. They compare different compression algorithms by listening souls of final judgment was always listening tests. So what were the testers listening to? For quite some time as the task was to find difficult pieces of music because the very first attempts to do music compression already worked quite nicely for some signals and sounded horrible for us us. I had Glockenspiel as one early example of sounding horrible. What was easy easy was dance music, like if you had a full symphony orchestra or pop group which lots of sounds, that was easier. So it's when sounds are very distinct that it's easy to hear the limits of the compression. Is that correct? Correct? And one of the most difficult was Susan Vega's voice in her Solitude Standing appena piece Tom's Diner. It's a track on Suzanne vegas album Solitude Standing. Back in nineteen eighty seven. When the album was released, it became the epitome of a certain sort of unthreatening, good taste, yuppie dinner party music. Solitude Standing was the kind of record that people with new CD players would buy to showcase the performance of their high fire systems. This album went platinum in the US, and it was even more popular in Europe, so it's not surprising that a CD of Solitude Standing was floating around in some European lab where engineers were obsessing over digital audio standards. So Carl Hines and his colleagues compressed and listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega. They also listened to Tracy Chapman, Haydn, and Ornette Coleman. He might ask why they didn't test their system on even more varieties of music. Well, because it took eight hours to digitize just twenty seconds of sound. The song Tom's Diner alone is two minutes and nine seconds long. That would take more than two days of processing. So they used tiny snippets twenty seconds long and played them again and again and again. We tried it and it sounded horrible, really horrible. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner, and this simple sound of a woman's voice turned out to be one of the hardest to get right. The problem was worst with Vega's vowels. When she sang, she distributed sound energy all across the audio spectrum. The algorithm was designed to make a kind of trade off. It could get one aspect of the sound perfect, but another would be sketchy. Finally they worked out a fix and those Doo doodoo started to sound pretty good. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner, I am waiting at the counter. The problem was when the scores came in at a later meeting, no one could actually decide which of the fourteen competitors sounded best. The story of how it exactly went down is byzantine and technical. All you really need to know is that the process got bad tempered, and finally there was a compromise. At the hand of a conference, it had been decided the audio standard would have three different layers. Not three different standards, Oh no, not three different things. Layers like a cake, a nice tasty cake. And one of the three winners was the version developed by Karl Heinz. Its official name was Motion Picture Expert Group one Audio Layer Number three, or as it came to be known, the MP three, and the music industry would never be the same as Karl Heinz Brandenburg shook ends and was congratulated for his work on audio compression he had no idea what he had unleashed. He and his employer, a research lab called Fraunhofer, just wanted to sell some boxes of high end electronics to recording studios. We sought physical boxes and we licensed to companies how to build these physical boxes. But this was for professional use. We had software out there. And then some young guy from Australia used a Stone credit card number to buy one of these professional encoders. So he just built his own user interface, put our encoding library into it, put everything to GASA, and he told everybody to take off the software off their FTP sides. But of course knows this has been the same until now. In the Internet, you can't get things removed. It's still somewhere by now. It was nineteen ninety seven. The hacker eventually got arrested and the MP three eight the music industry. Within a few years, it had almost destroyed the compact disc. It cannibalized record company profits and made it harder for musicians to earn a living. In nineteen ninety nine, MP three surpassed sex as the most searched word on the Internet. By the late nineties, music was being pumped into our brains like a fire hose. Music fans like me could collect more than we could ever listen to. So much music. Of course, the technology was not without its critics. Do you know who you are? Metallica? I love and everything you do, except for that bad show your host of. You know what, maybe I wouldn't have to horn myself out if your kids didn't steal my music. So that's Marlon Wayne's and Lars Ulric doing a skit at the MTV Video Music Awards in two thousand. To me, the most interesting thing about the creation of the MP three isn't the story of Napster or the iPod or whatever. It's about what got kept and what got thrown away. If you're compressing a song down to ten percent of its original size, then what do you get rid of? Karl Heinz's MP three algorithm separates sound into two parts, the wheat and the chaff. The idea that such a decision could be subjective is displeasing to him, But I wonder can it really be objective? How do you tell information from noise? And what exactly is information? Is there like a living room or somewhere a little bit more away from drill we could probably do with the marking, and I'm really sorry about Let's try. There's a room. Yeah down here, let's see if that's the sound of me, My producers Hunter and Rider, and the science writer James Glick, trying to find somewhere quiet to talk in his apartment slightly. In nineteen eighty seven, James wrote a book called Chaos, all about the mathematical discovery of so called chaos theory. Oddly for a book about math, Chaos was something of a countercultural classic in nineties Britain. People skinned up joints on its cover, sitting under psychedelic posters of Mandelbrot sets and talking about the butterfly effect before their pills came on and they headed out into the fields to make crop circles. I don't know if James knows about his impact on the rave Ea and anyway, it's not really what I've come to talk to him about. It's louder here, it feels happy. Yeah, let's just go back to the kitchen table and we'll work with what we got. Someone somewhere in James's building is renovating. He says it could be several flaws away, but because of the acoustics. The sound of power tools is audible wherever we go. It is I suppose a sort of cosmic joke that we can't talk without noise getting onto the recording, because I've come to talk to him about noise, or rather about the difference between signal a noise. This binary opposition is at the core of the modern idea of information, and James has written a book about it, called The Information A History a Theory Flood. It's obviously an old word information, and you can look it up in the OED and it goes back many centuries, but it wasn't the kind of word it is now. It wasn't a common word, and it didn't refer to the stuff that we think of as information, the whole collection of sounds, words, images, types of knowledge that are encoded biologically. We understand information as a gigantic and extremely important category of stuff for us, and that began, I argue at a very specific moment of time. On the notes I wrote to prepare for this interview, one name appears again and again. Claude Shannon. He was a scientist who first introduced the idea that information was something you could measure. He published his Mathematical Theory of communication in nineteen forty eight, the first time he defines information the way a scientist needs to define it as a thing that you can measure. There's a unit of measure for information, and we all know what that is. It's the bit yes or no, on or off, zero or one, a very precise thing. Before that, the idea of measuring information didn't make any sense. It was like, could you have a scientific unit of measure for happiness or for anxiety or for fog? And then once you've got them in bits, you have something that applies to everything else. You can start to say how many bits are there in a book? How many bits of information are there in that painting? Does that? Is that a question that makes sense? As a writer, I think of myself as someone who deals with information that when I use that word, I'm not speaking in the mathematical terms of Claude Shannon. I'm someone who deals with meaning. I'm trying to make this podcast as meaningful as I can. When I do that, I think of it as being rich in information. But for Claude Shannon, it wasn't like that at all. Information had nothing to do with meaning. It is counterintuitive. It seems to us that if we start to talk about informa nation, apart from meaning you're you're talking about noise again. And Shannon's contemporaries also found this difficult to grasp, so he had to really emphasize that. He had to say again and again that the content of a message was irrelevant to the kind of mathematical treatment he was creating. He was measuring the bit content of a given message, and that bit content didn't depend on whether the message was crucially important or whether it was just a lot of nonsense. Can you just say the thing about this thing? There is my sentence about the signal and information again, and there's a bus that drove by. Oh, but what was it the signal? Give me a little more these interruptions demonstrating what we're talking about. Is the bus passing outside signal or noise? Could it be both? I found myself when I was thinking about this question working on the book, thinking about particular pieces of music like a Bach prelude. I mean, I'm thinking particularly of the first one in C major, yeah, which you know is on the Voyager Golden Records that's making its way to to other galaxies. Because Carl Sagan and his committee thought it would reveal something about us as human beings. Well this, you ask yourself, how much information is in this bach prelude? You play it, and the first thing you notice is it's very repetitious. It's the same thing over and over again, except that it keeps changing a little bit. And if you were Claude Shannon, you would say, well, I could compress this algorithmically, because all I really need is the changes. The stuff that repeats itself is not new information. And as a listener, you also recognize the tension between these two things. You recognize that if it's the patterns that you sense that make it beautiful, and it's also the fact that the patterns do not repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful. Claude Shannon's revelation was that information is a measure of complexity, so you can assign it a number. But being complex is not the same as being meaningful. Things can be complex and meaningless, as anyone alive in twenty twenty can attest. When it comes to sounding good, let alone esthetic beauty. It's not about information. Shannon leaves us cold. He leaves us empty for exactly that reason that he tried to remove the human element from the equation, he explicitly removed meaning from the equation. And meaning is what we want. Meaning is what we are desperate for, So how do we find it? Meaning is what we're desperate for? And James Blick's main question is how do we find it? I've always thought of meaning as something you make, for example, through words and stories, but maybe meaning is now something we have to reclaim from our algorithms. The listening test for the MP three were done in Germany, and so they were predominantly engineers, and I think mostly white, uh, sort of German men, professional, sort of audio professionals. This is Ryan McGuire, a composer based in Chicago. It was his ghostly music that I found on the Internet a few years ago while I was writing my novel White Tears. His music is what led me down the rabbit hole of audio compression and the MP three. Ryan's obsessed with the early listening tests that led to the MP three, all those German engineer is with the CDs. I don't think it was particularly systematic, but the songs for the MP three listening tests, the early MP three listening tests, you can tell that they were trying to have a sort of breadth of material. So you have Tom Steiner by Susan Vega, which you know, solo, unaccompanied a cappella vocal. Then you have sort of an acoustic pop song, fast Car by Tracy Chapman. You have a trumpet excerpt from Hyden's Trumpet Concerto, and you have surprisingly, you have an excerpt from Ornette Coleman's in All Languages, so you have even some jazz. The remaining songs were sort of test audio files. There was one of a cloud and a couple of others, so it doesn't sound like there there's anything with complicated percussion or a lot of bass. Those would both be things that I would I would have thought might be quite difficult for a coding system to handle. You're exactly right. Obviously, all of those recordings are major label recordings done to sort of high fidelity standards. You know, they didn't test any punk records. There's no hip hop or like dance music or something that has a lot of emphasis on base. There's not a lot of the grittiness that many listeners value in rock and roll or blues. That raw feeling there is sort of a tension there between different esthetic value systems. Would it be too much to say that their MP three would be different if different people had been in the listening tests and different music had been chosen to test with. No, I don't think that's too much to say. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee. And it's still hard to remember when you're humming along to Tom's Diner, enjoying the intimacy of Susanne Vega's voice, that it's totally reconstructed. This is an MP three, a thing made out of code. It's an artifact produced according to a set of technical and esthetic specifications by a group of audio engineers. And I look the other way as they are kissing their hellos and unpretending not to see them, and instead I pour the milk. Audio compression exists at the border where objective perception becomes subjective taste. It's where the physics of sound shades into what sounds good to a particular person with their own likes and dislikes and a particular, culturally defined idea of what good sounds, sounds like. What gets kept is simple, it becomes the MP three of Tom's Diner. But what happens to the rest the parts that get thrown away? Ryan wanted to hear those parts, so he said about rescuing them from oblivion. He wanted to hear what kind of music he could make from the scraps. If you've ever compressed something made an MP three yourself, there are a range of different settings, so you can set the bit rate and you can decide how their stereo encoding has done. I started by just compressing Tom's Diner in as you know, in all the different ways that I could, and comparing, you know, listening to the differences how they sounded, and then inverting them basically measuring them against the original uncompressed audio and subtracting and finding the difference, finding you know, what was left out when it went down to this compressed form. The material that I found most interesting ended up being, you know, when you had the highest quality MP three compression settings, that lost material was very sort of whispy, spectral and just yeah, very evocative. In Ryan's music, we hear the shape of something that's not there. It's everything we don't hear in the MP three version of the song, the version that pops up instantly when we click on the track and pipe pit into our organs of Corty. So much has been left behind. There's always someone doing the listening you on your commute or folding your laundry, listening to me speaking in to a microphone, conveying information out of the past. I sound good to you or I don't. Maybe you feel like something's lost, something just out of reach. It is always nice to see you, says though man behind the counter to the woman who has come in. She is shaking her umbrella, and I look the other way as they are kissing their hellos and unpretending not to see them, and instead I pour the milk. I open up the paper. There's a story of an actor who had died while he was drinking. It was no one I had heard of. And I'm turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies when I'm feeling someone watching me, and so I raised my head. There's a woman on the outside looking inside as she see me. No, she does not really see me, because she sees her own reflection. And I'm trying not to notice that she's hitching up her skirt and while she's straightening her stockings, her hair has gotten wet. Oh, this rain, it will continue through the morning. As I'm listening to the bells of the cathedral, I am thinking of your voice and of the midnight picnic once upon a time before the rain began, and I finished up my coffee and it's time to catch the train. Here trapped inside my MP three, I find strange memories coming to the four and other people's strange memories too. We had live animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats, crickets to stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his gear for exploding and h and he just was just complete chaos, chaos and art and philosophy from the golden age of cyberspace. That's next time on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Spatial Relations. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti, also known as lip Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review and Spotify playlist of songs that inspired this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at Harry Kunzru. I'm no one I had heard of Harry Kunzru. See you next time.