
The Ghost in the MP3 (2014) - Tomte
http://theghostinthemp3.com/theghostinthemp3.html
======
LeoPanthera
> primarily designed by and for western-european men, and using the music they
> liked

What is the point of this sentence? Any value this may have as a technical or
art piece is lost by the random attack on the creators and their race.

I'm not even convinced that it is true. I was under the impression that they
chose music specifically that was difficult to compress well.

~~~
nxc18
It seemed like they had a larger social justice angle for the piece, then
realized it didn’t read well or forgot to write it in the first piece.

To be honest, I expected the article to go that route just from that
statement, but refreshingly it didn’t. While valid, the social justice
argument is hard to take seriously - audio engineers are people, too, and you
can’t expect everyone to be aware of every single one of their biases.
Especially not back in the times when MP3 was created.

Still, it would be interesting to read about the technical differences between
music in different cultures. As technology spreads in the developing world,
accommodating all cultures will grow as an issue.

~~~
EliRivers
So what wording should people use when they want to suggest that someone's
culture constrained their thinking, without triggering the anti-SJW brigade?
Some of those people are so easy to accidentally trigger and so sensitive. How
could we have a conversation about this without upsetting them and the
conversation subsequently degrading?

~~~
tjoff
Instead of originating with gender and trying to fit in taste of music etc.
into that. Start with what is relevant, the music, maybe that happens to fit
nicely into what is considered popular for a specific group of people. Maybe
not.

"It seems they targeted this kind of music which would have been quite typical
for XXX during that time."

Or mentioning more specifically that they omitted this kind of music which
could explain why it perform poorly in that context.

The quote also reads that they it was designed explicitly for western-european
men, the gap between that and "they might have biases toward their own taste"
is astronomical.

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lozf
Once again a "null test" like this, completely disregards the fact that lossy
codecs such as MP3 use a psycho-acoustic model to determine which frequencies
can be discarded with minimal impact to what humans actually hear, and is
therefore misleading if considered as a means for judging the audio quality of
a codec... mildly interesting as an art project though.

~~~
joe5150
I think that is literally what the project is about.

~~~
lozf
Just posted for clarity - I remember people getting the wrong end of the stick
when it first became popular.

------
dang
Previously at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7955917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7955917),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049196).

------
sp332
This project seems to only use the LAME encoder, but it would be interesting
to see if other codecs give different creative results. And now that the
patents have expired, someone could even write their own codecs from scratch
with interesting artifacts in mind.

