MP3: A Little Sound Goes a Long Way

As digital devices like MP3 players get smaller and smaller, you'd think it would be only a matter of time before the files that reside on them get smaller and smaller, too. And you'd be right--a thousand times over, thanks to the work of researchers at the University of Rochester who have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a conventional MP3 file.

The research team of Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology, and doctoral students Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, encoded a 20-second clarinet solo in less than a single kilobyte. In doing so, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound--mouthpiece, fingering, how the sound radiates from the instrument, and so on. They then built a computer model of the clarinet. You can decide for yourself as to how good a job they did by comparing this human performance recorded using MP3 format with this virtual performance using Bocko's new compression.

The current method handles only a single instrument at a time, although the engineering team is collaborating with musicians to extend that. Bocko believes that the quality will continue to improve as the acoustic measurements and the resulting synthesis algorithms become more accurate, and he says this process may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.

Sounds okay to me.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:00 AM  Permalink