MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Rilegato

Sterne, Jonathan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822352834 ISBN 13: 9780822352839

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2012

Riassunto

MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s.

MP3s are products of compression, a process that removes sounds unlikely to be heard from recordings. Although media history is often characterized as a progression toward greater definition, fidelity, and truthfulness, MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates the crucial role of compression in the development of modern media and sound culture. Taking the history of compression as his point of departure, Jonathan Sterne investigates the relationships among sound, silence, sense, and noise; the commodity status of recorded sound and the economic role of piracy; and the importance of standards in the governance of our emerging media culture. He demonstrates that formats, standards, and infrastructures—and the need for content to fit inside them—are every bit as central to communication as the boxes we call "media."

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is the author of the award-winning book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of The Sound Studies Reader. Sterne has written for Tape Op, Punk Planet, Bad Subjects, and other alternative press venues. He also makes music and other audio works. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

Product Description:

Marking a significant turn in media and communications studies, this extraordinary sonic history connects the world's most popular format for recording audio to ideas about ears, media, and technology as they have emerged and developed since the early twentieth century. Jonathan Sterne contends that everything we think we know about hearing in the state of nature is a result of the interaction between ears and technologies in twentieth-century science and engineering. The model of hearing built into the MP3 format reveals the extent to which compression, rather than verisimilitude, is a driving force in the history and ongoing development of communication technology, sonic culture, and aesthetics.Sterne argues that formats, standards, infrastructures, and protocols are displacing the boxes that we call "media" as the technological keys to understanding the history and future of communication. Every MP3 bears the imprint of a theory of human hearing or, rather, its gaps and absences. Investigating the theories of hearing built into the format, he sheds new light on twentieth-century ideas about ears and media, the surprising ways that those ideas functioned both technologically and culturally, and their implications for future studies of media, technology, and the senses.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0822352834
• ISBN 13: 9780822352839
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 341