Jonathan Sterne

The book is more than half over by the time the author actually gets to the MP3; the rest is prehistory—how the demands of business led researchers to investigate how human ears actually heard and what sounds they could do without (for purposes of compression and dealing with “noise” on telephone lines). Experimentation on cats is involved, which leads Sterne to suggest that the Napster logo unwittingly calls back to the long-term relationship between cats, hearing, and technology, and if that seems clever or ridiculous to you that may indicate your probable reaction to the rest of the book. As always, technologies were shaped with particular people in mind. Just as film quality was judged by how well it did portraying white people, encoding, including mp3 encoding, was judged by how good it sounded to “expert” listeners listening to music they thought was important; they just happen to have been almost entirely white male Westerners, so they tried to make “Tom’s Diner” sound good but didn’t spend much time on rhythm-driven music. Probably a book for hard-core fans of high theory history of technology only.… (meer)