Tech History: Suzanne Vega, a song, and how MP3 was invented

Back in 1982 Suzanne Vega wrote a song called "Tom's Diner"... yes, the famous one remixed by DNA with the heavy bass line, dance beat, and synth horns, but the original was an a cappella song.

By 1984 it had been released on an obscure folk compilation, and didn't appear on Vega's studio albums until 1987's Solitude Standing.

Yet, the catchy tune has made Vega the "Mother of the MP3".

How's that you wonder? Well... read on.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

In 1988, German audio engineer Karl-Heinz Brandenburg and his team were working developing an audio compression scheme.

The compression works on the basis of "masking" - what we hear, what we don't hear — that sometimes when hear something it's masked by other sounds. 

Think having a cello and violin side by side with the cello in the foreground.
Those 'other' sounds are removed from the file making the file smaller and thereby compressing it. 

It was during a series of compression algorithm tests when Dr. Brandenburg heard "Toms Diner'(Vegas original version) playing on the radio down the hall near his office.

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner-Original Version

Brandenburg used Vega's a cappella version of "Tom's Diner" to fine tune the compression system, playing the track before and after compression was applied to tell whether the song sounded good enough. He figured Vega's song would be a tough track to compress and would be a good test for whether the compressed version was really listenable.

That was in 1988, and it took Dr. Brandenburg and his team another 5 years of trial and error before they were finally satisfied with the sound quality of the song. 
Compression still removed a significant portion of the data, but the difference was undetected by audio experts.

So, in 1993 Dr Brandenburg and his colleagues submitted the compression system to the Motion Picture Experts Group (That's the group that sets the standard for audio and video compression) and MPEG Audio Layer III was born.