Interlude. Why MP3 Works at All

In the late eighties the German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg, who worked with the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, was looking for a recording on which his audio compression algorithm would fail most noticeably. In an audio engineering magazine he read that people testing good equipment often used Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”, a song she sings alone, with no instruments, in a warm, rich voice. There was nowhere to hide compression flaws behind drums and guitars. Brandenburg listened to that recording thousands of times, after every rework of the algorithm, and on the first versions Vega’s voice sounded terrible. When Vega was invited to the Fraunhofer Institute in 2007, they played her what her song had sounded like in those years, and since then she has been called the mother of the MP3.

The same song had a second machine life. In 1990 the British production duo DNA put a dance beat under Vega’s voice and sent the result around the clubs as a bootleg record without asking anyone. Vega, on hearing it, did not know whether to sue or to congratulate them. Instead of going to court, her label A&M bought the remix and released it officially, after which “Tom’s Diner” with someone else’s beat went to number one in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.