Music history weblog

While musical life in Europe was undoubtedly rich in the early Medieval era, as attested by artistic depictions of instruments, writings about music, and other records, the only European repertory which has survived from before about 800 is the monophonic liturgical plainsong of the Roman Catholic Church, the central tradition of which was called Gregorian chant. Several schools of liturgical polyphony flourished in the period after about 1100. Alongside these traditions of sacred music, a vibrant tradition of secular song developed, exemplified by the music of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger.

Much of the surviving music of 14th century Europe is secular. By the middle of the 15th century, composers and singers used a smooth polyphony for sacred musical compositions such as the mass, the motet, and the laude, and secular forms such as the chanson and the madrigal. The introduction of commercial printing had an immense influence on the dissemination of musical styles

A range of paleolithic sites have yielded bones in which lateral holes have been pierced: these are usually identified as flutes[2], blown at one end like the Japanese shakuhachi. The earliest written records of musical expression are to be found in the Sama Veda of India and in 4,000 year old cuneiform from Ur.[citation needed] Instruments, such as the seven-holed flute and various types of stringed instruments have been recovered from the Indus valley civilization archaeological sites.[3] India has one of the oldest musical traditions in the world—references to Indian classical music (marga) can be found in the ancient scriptures of the Hindu tradition, the Vedas. The traditional art or court music of China has a history stretching for more than three thousand years. Music was an important part of cultural and social life in Ancient Greece: mixed-gender choruses performed for entertainment, celebration and spiritual ceremonies; musicians and singers had a prominent role in ancient Greek theater; music was part of children’s basic education.[citation needed]

Al-Farabi (c. 872 - c. 950) wrote a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir (”Great Book of Music”). He played and invented a variety of musical instruments and devised the Arab tone system of pitch organisation, which is still used in Arabic music.

The psycho-acoustic masking codec was first proposed, apparently independently in 1979, by Manfred Schroeder, et al.[1] in Germany and M. A.Krasner[2] in the United States. Krasner was the first to publish and to produce hardware, but the publication of his results as a relatively obscure Lincoln Laboratory Technical Report did not immediately influence the mainstream of psychoacoustic codec development. Manfred Schroeder was already a well known and revered figure in the world wide community of acoustical and electrical engineers and his paper had immediate influence in European and specifically German circles of acoustic and source-coding (audio compression) research. Both Krasner and Schroeder built upon the work of E. F. Zwicker.[3]

The immediate predecessor of MP3, and the first practical implementation in hardware (Krasner’s hardware was too cumbersome and slow for practical use), was “Optimum Coding in the Frequency Domain” (OCF),[4] which was an implementation of a psychoacoustic transform coder based on Motorola 56000 DSP chips. MP3 is directly descended from OCF. MP3 represents the outcome of the collaboration of Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg with the Fraunhofer Society for Integrated Circuits, Erlangen, with relatively minor contributions from the Musicam (MP2) branch of psychoacoustic sub-band coders.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 encoding began as the Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) project managed by Egon Meier-Engelen of the Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt (later on called Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, German Aerospace Center) in Germany. This project was financed by the European Union as a part of the EUREKA research program where it was commonly known as EU-147, which ran from 1987 to 1994.

As a doctoral student at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Karlheinz Brandenburg began working on digital music compression in the early 1980s, focusing on how people perceive music. He completed his doctoral work in 1989 and became an assistant professor at Erlangen-Nuremberg. While there, he continued to work on music compression with scientists at the Fraunhofer Society (in 1993 he joined the staff of the Fraunhofer Institute).[5]

In 1991, there were two proposals available: Musicam (known as Layer 2), and ASPEC - (Short excerpt on German Wikipedia) (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding). The Musicam technique, as proposed by Philips (The Netherlands), CCETT (France) and Institut für Rundfunktechnik (Germany) was chosen due to its simplicity and error robustness, as well as its low computational power associated with the encoding of high quality compressed audio. The Musicam format, based on sub-band coding, was a key to settle the basis of the MPEG Audio compression format (sampling rates, structure of frames, headers, number of samples per frame). Its technology and ideas were fully incorporated into the definition of ISO MPEG Audio Layer I and Layer II and further on of the Layer III (MP3) format. Under the chairmanship of Professor Mussmann (University of Hannover) the editing of the standard was made under the responsibilities of Leon van de Kerkhof (Layer I) and Gerhard Stoll (Layer II).

A working group consisting of Leon Van de Kerkhof (The Netherlands), Gerhard Stoll (Germany), Leonardo Chiariglione (Italy), Yves-François Dehery (France), Karlheinz Brandenburg (Germany) took ideas from Musicam and ASPEC, added some of their own ideas and created MP3, which was designed to achieve the same quality at 128 kbit/s as MP2 at 192 kbit/s.

All algorithms were approved in 1991 and finalized in 1992 as part of MPEG-1, the first standard suite by MPEG, which resulted in the international standard ISO/IEC 11172-3, published in 1993. Further work on MPEG audio was finalized in 1994 as part of the second suite of MPEG standards, MPEG-2, more formally known as international standard ISO/IEC 13818-3, originally published in 1995.

Compression efficiency of encoders is typically defined by the bit rate, because compression rate depends on the bit depth and sampling rate of the input signal. Nevertheless, there are often published compression rates that use the CD parameters as references (44.1 kHz, 2 channels at 16 bits per channel or 2×16 bit). Sometimes the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) SP parameters are used (48 kHz, 2×16 bit). Compression ratios with this reference are higher, which demonstrates the problem of the term compression ratio for lossy encoders.

Karlheinz Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” to assess the MP3 compression algorithm. This song was chosen because of its softness and simplicity, making it easier to hear imperfections in the compression format during playbacks. Some jokingly refer to Suzanne Vega as “The mother of MP3″. Some more critical audio excerpts (glockenspiel, triangle, accordion, etc.) were taken from the EBU V3/SQAM reference compact disc and have been used by professional sound engineers to assess the subjective quality of the MPEG Audio formats.