The Song That Tuned the MP3
Brandenburg needed a song his MP3 codec could not handle. Suzanne Vega's 'Tom's Diner' — voice alone, no instruments — was it.
In the early 1990s, Karlheinz Brandenburg, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, was finishing the audio codec that would be standardised as MPEG-1 Layer III — what the world would later call the MP3. He had a problem most engineers want: he needed test material his codec was likely to fail on.
He had read in a hi-fi magazine that audio reviewers used "Tom's Diner," the a cappella opening track of Suzanne Vega's 1987 album Solitude Standing, to evaluate high-end sound systems. The voice is dry, exposed, with no instruments behind it — exactly the kind of recording where compression artifacts are easiest to hear. If the MP3 could compress Tom's Diner without making it sound metallic or smeared, the codec was probably good enough for everything else.
Brandenburg listened to the same clip over and over for years. Each iteration of the algorithm tweaked the psychoacoustic model — the part of the codec that decides which frequencies the human ear is unlikely to notice missing, and which are doing too much listening work to throw away. He has said he listened to "Tom's Diner" thousands of times.
The format was finalised as MPEG Layer III in 1992 and published as ISO/IEC 11172-3 in 1993. Within a decade the MP3 had reorganised the music industry: Napster, the iPod, the loss of the album as a unit, the long fight over file sharing. None of it is what Suzanne Vega thought she was doing when she recorded an unaccompanied verse about pouring a coffee in the morning.
Audiophiles call her, half-seriously, the Mother of the MP3.
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