Sound Reproduction After Noise: Perceptual Coding and the Homology of the Fields, 1955-1979

MP3s get their small file size through a process called “perceptual coding.” An MP3 encoder scans a soundfile, estimates which parts of the recording will be inaudible to the ear, and disposes of those parts, thereby making the resulting MP3 file considerably smaller than the “same” song on a compact disc. In this talk, I will trace the origins of the ideas behind perceptual coding, and show how they traveled from psychoacoustics to communications and computer engineering in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the key insights of psychoacousticians and engineers during this period carry strange and interesting parallels to key writings on music and sound in the humanistic tradition, most notably by Roland Barthes and Jacques Attali. The paper considers what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the homology of the fields” among psychoacoustics, engineering, aesthetics, architectural acoustics and political economy in an attempt to explain why perceptual coding emerged when it did, given that the technology and the theory were available for at least a decade before the process was first realized.