Music Is My Hot Hot Sex

MP3 MP3 What Art Thee

In a world of high definition video and audio, Blu-Ray, players, high end game counsels, and portable compact computers; media for these devices can only exist if they develop with the hardware. Currently it seems a global goal for most technology is to make it smaller and faster without sacrificing quality. It is this same goal that fueled The Fraunhofer Institute of Germany to create compressed audio for digital media. And so was born the MP3…

What exactly is a MP3? A MP3 is lossy audio on the third layer of standard MPEG-1. The goal of any compressed audio is lower the bit rate, and consequently the size of the audio file, without noticeable degradation of the sound quality. When Fraunhofer’s research was completed on MP3s, they were reported by its creators to reduce an audio file’s original CD size by a factor of twelve without losing quality.

What do MP3s allow us to do? With MP3 technology we have been able to make use of high capacity storage in new ways (standard data on a CD vs. MP3 data disk), easily transfer music throughout the internet, and even make music more portable/customizable. Without compressed audio modern computer users would probably have whole hard drives just dedicated to the music we want to store (And if you already dedicate a hard drive to music… multiply that data used by twelve to get an idea).

Historical Context

The MP3 Fraunhofer project started in the late 80s with a seemly cliché code name “EUREKA Project.” In the 80s there was a huge uprising of interest in personal computing. Apple and Microsoft were both competing for ubiquity, but neither had a market for sound at this point. Computers were mostly designed in replacement of typing devices to do word processing, and also to give a graphical interface to programming.

The way we see digital technology now was created rapidly over the last twenty years. The uprising of computing brought a lot experimental programming to the plate and spawned many new interfaces or mediums if you will, for media to exist on. For example, some of the first MP3 players were technically created before MP3s even existed. As with most awesome inventions that are ahead of their time, the idea was there with no practical use… yet.

One other major event happening in sync with MP3 creation was the creation music videos for TV. MTV brought out a whole new interest and incentive for music. Not only could people listen to new high quality sound CD versions of the music, but they could also view the artist’s visual interpretations of music by watching MTV. MTV allowed for people to find new up and coming artists also. This created a new and thriving music culture that gave each person the ability to learn more about their musical preferences. Now if only there was an easy way to share all your CDs and preferences with the community.

Digital videos and audio seem like a ‘must have” by today’s standards. Unfortunately in the 80’s, there was really no common use for such a technology due to lack of available hardware. Two of the lead designers of MP3s, Prof. Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg imagined this technology could be used to transfer data of phone/fax lines, but it would have to be compressed to work. If you think back, there was only really telephone modems to connect to the internet. Therefore thinking along the lines of music transfer through fax would be acceptable.

Computer media also had no function in the early years of computing. Computers weren’t toys, they weren’t entertainment centers, and they mostly just focused on data processing. Even if you had an MP3, what program would be able to play it? Why wouldn’t you just find a way to fit more music on a compact disc instead? Why bog up the limited hard drive space on a computer when you already have a personal media play in your home (VHS, CD player, Cassette Tapes, etc.)?

How Did The Creation Of MP3s Connect With The World?

The real question is why not have all of your personal media playable from your computer? Even after MP3 technology was published in 1993, there was still no way to play a MP3. As hard drives got a little bigger, computers got a little faster, and interfaces got a little more useable, Tomislav Uzelac was working on an MP3 player called AMP. Later, the program was adapted to the Windows operating system and renamed Winamp. Since Windows could previously only play proprietary files (wma/wmv), this was a huge step for digital media.

Apple was also working on its own proprietary audio playback engines but was nowhere near its productivity with the loss of Steve Jobs in 1985. Now that there is a way to play MP3 in the late 90s, Apple needed a way to compete in the digital sound market. Apple looked like it was in a spiraling downfall in 1998 until Jobs miraculously returned as CEO to save the day. One of his biggest remodeling ideas for the company was to run full steam ahead into the MP3 market.

The iPod was one of Steve Jobs’ greatest ideas for apple to date. Released in 2001, it was not the very first portable player of MP3 player on the market. However, Jobs combined fashion, state of the art technology, culture, and marketability to transform Apple into a power house in the music industry. Now people could fulfill that desire to bring their personal music preferences everywhere they go, and all in a new “micro-sized’ pakage. There was no more CD player or boom box with a whole flipbook of cds to carry around. All that was need was one device that could hold all your favorites at the time.

How Did MP3 Development Affect Other Industries?

Usually with hardware, the smaller it gets the more portable it gets. When hard drives, CPUs, and circuits got smaller, we had personal computers. When we had personal computers we had the power to convert analogue to digital. MP3s allowed us to store in essence multiple CDs on one CD. Once we learned about compression we tried to find new ways to perfect it. Apple came out with its AAC audio format used with MPEG-4. MP3 players started being created by every major electronics company. A new music culture was formed like the 80’s MTV.

The MP3 culture started with the iPod. It was trendy, you identify with others, and it was relatively expensive. Although there were plenty of other MP3 players on the market iPods sold more units than another competing company. I myself had a third party MP3 all through high school and never complained once about the quality I got at a quarter price of an iPod. What was different? I always knew the difference was the culture, but what I realize now that I never understood was why everyone thought that culture was so cool. It was all about the interface… not the “cool” silhouetted commercials or one hit wonder songs… but the interface.

Apple put mass amounts of time, effort and user testing into finding the right solution to portable media experience. This is shown through the decade of 2000-2010, by the mass increase in models of iPods. What they have done is create a unique instance of MP3 listening for every individual. With first iPod it wasn’t that you could just hear the audio, a little LCD screen showed who was playing with album art and touch sensitive volume. Then hard drives aren’t needed or top-of-the-line anymore, Apple switches to flash storage with the iPod Nano and shuffle. That is what the MP3 culture is about. The crazy part is because of MP3s … the culture has expanded way past just audio.

After flash memory was cheap enough for most consumers to own gigabyte thumb drives (Mid 21st century), it wasn’t about what kind of MP3 player you had… it was about where you had it. Now people can set MP3s as your ringtone for your phone, smart phones can store gigs of music through external memory, game counsels can download media from the internet, and the same MTV that was just for watching, is now interactive. You can download MP3 ringtones by texting a number on the screen. There was a lot of transfer being done from MP3 to computer, from computer to MP3 player, Mp3 player to other MP3 player (Zune). Where is the media convergence? I believe that the universal takeover of all Medias today lies in the iPhone’s hands. It has single handedly dipped its toes in almost every major market and it has succeeded because that’s what people want… a black box device…a universal remote

What can your MP3 player do? Mine can, browse through my picture, access the internet, play video games, create music, share files, write word documents, find a date and a restaurant to bring her… o yea did I mention play MP3s?… and this all was spawned from the convenience of a compressed audio file.

In Conclusion

Mp3s have affected production and user interfaces in many different industries, even outside of audio. Compression made it possible to fit hundreds of songs on one CD, which in turn made manufactures of any CD player (home stereo, car audio, personal walkmens, etc.) adapt to MP3 playable. Compressed audio allowed DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s to have more space for video. Visualization for audio became “hot” and now every player needed a graphical element. Computer players had to find new ways to organize mass amounts of MP3s (tagging). Tagging is now used for intelligent playlists. Omputers and operating systems have been designed to play MP3s. Mp3 plays have been turned into computers and phones. MP3s created a need for ubiquitous systems.

Will there ever be a totally universal black box?

In the case of the iPod the functionality was basically already created with Winamp, how did this affect the focus on its interface?

Besides turning MP3 players in to personal micro-computers and spawning ideas for ubiquitous computing, what other technologies did its creation affect?

Works cited :

Wikipedia.org

About.com

A brief history of Human Computer Interaction Technology

The article, “A Brief History of Human-Computer Interaction Technology” is a brief description of the history of HCI technology from 1950s to 1990s. In the article, Brad A. Myers talks about the importance of research at universities’ research labs or at corporate or government supporting research labs in the development of HCI technology. Especially, university research labs have led to many innovative HCI technologies. Figure 1 on p.46 shows that, for the major HCI technologies, university research was started earlier than the corporate research or commercial products development.

Recently, HCI technology has been rapidly developed and diversified, so it seems that we are trying to interact with almost every object around us in a way that wasn’t possible before. However, the basic concepts and ideas about the way to interact with computers or computer equipped objects originated from the research labs in the 1950s. These technologies include Hypertext and Multimedia; the ways to input information with machines, like mouse, tablet, and motion sensing device; and effective representations, like GUI and Three-Dimensionality. Also, these ways to interact with machines change the way we understand and interact with the world.

For some of the innovative foundation technologies, when they were born in a research lab, even developers didn’t know how they would be used in the future and how they would change the world. For example, the idea for hypertext which makes possible today’s internet was initially tried in universities’ research labs like Stanford University, Brown University and The University of Vermont. Then, the hypertext idea was developed into World Wide Web, which was created at the government-funded European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) and developed at the University of Illinois’ National Center (NCSA) (p.49). This technology was not only a starting point of the internet but also changed people’s way of thinking from linear and directional to non linear and multidirectional. Also, all these fundamental changes were made possible by creative experiments at research labs, and today’s HCI technology is being developed according to the basic concepts of these changes.

Another important fact that Myers mentions is government funds that make a lot of HCI research possible. Even though there were a lot of technologies and interfaces that were funded by companies like IBM, Xerox, and Apple in the history of HCI, the more fundamental and conceptual changes and experimental trials were started by government funding. For example, The Mouse was developed with funding from ARPA and NASA (p.47). Virtual Reality technology, which is now being developed by many private companies like Microsoft and Nintendo, was also started by government funds from the Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency.

To illustrate the importance of research labs and government support for the research labs, Myers describes what kind of HCI technologies have been created and how the technologies were developed. This helps basic understanding about the field of HCI. Myers explains four different types of technologies: Basic Interactions, Applications, Up-and-coming Areas, and Software Tools and Architectures. For the Basic Interaction technology, he talks about early technologies of basic interface for interaction with computer, such as mouse, windows, and the way to operate objects on screen. For applications, he talks about drawing and text editing programs, hypertext, CAD, and graphical video games. For Up-and-Coming Areas, he talks about technologies for the near future, such as gesture recognition, three dimensionality, VR, AR, etc. For Software Tools and Architectures, he talks about technologies to create interfaces, like UI software tools and interface builders, and Component Architectures.

Reading this article, I thought that the importance and effect of research labs is not limited to the field of HCI. New concepts and technologies in HCI have been an important role in other fields. For instance, the development of electronic art and media art has been largely affected by HCI research. Myron Kruger’s early media art works, like “Videoplace”, would not be possible without his HCI research in the Computer Science lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His early works using interactive technology between art work and participants have become some of the most important and innovative works in Interactive Art. HCI technology brought conceptual changes as well as stylistic changes in art. Interaction and participation technologies like Computer-Supported Cooperative made people think of art itself more as a process by artists’ and audiences’ participation than an object completed by an artist.

Lastly, this article focuses on the importance of a research lab in development of new HCI technologies. However, I think, the role of research labs would be also very important for evaluation of existing technology.


Byul Shin

What is the Legacy of the Memex?

Introduction
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." During the war, Bush had been in charge of coordinating the research of six thousand American scientists as they attempted to apply their expertise to the battlefield. However, with the war at a close, Bush clearly crafted the paper for a civilian audience. Bush's main point is that we have accumulated a giant body of research, but we have not figured out how to organized knowledge so that it is immediately accessible.  With the war over, Bush asks, "What are the scientists to do next?" (1). "As We May Think" is Bush's answer to this question. His foresight was remarkable. He essentially sketched out what we now call the personal computer, the internet, Google and Web 2.0 all wrapped up in one, imaginative concept he called the "Memex."  Bush and his Memex influenced many of the luminaries in the fields of computer science and human-computer interaction (HCI), therefore, how can we characterize the impact of the Memex?

What is a Memex?

The Memex was a "sort of mechanized private file and library...a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory" (Bush 4).  What Bush imagined was essentially a modern desktop computer with internet access and a large hard drive. He describes the user building a "trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him" (4).  In fact, he even imagines saved searches, "And his trails do not fade" (4). He describes the idea of Google, "There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record" (12).  The Memex is capable of calling up Web 2.0 and Wikipedia-style collective intelligence technologies: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified" (4).

Influence of The Memex

Bush and the Memex have had a remarkably long and deep influence in the world HCI.  J.C.R. Licklider, one of the most important figures in the history of computing, HCI and the birth of the internet, credited Bush in the introduction to his 1965 book Libraries of the Future for defining the "information problem" (Stefik 23).  Another visionary directly influenced by Bush and the Memex was Doug Engelbart.  Engelbart was a genius far ahead of his time.  He invented the mouse, and he was using computers for video conferencing back in the 1960s ("Internet Pioneers").  In a 1962 letter to Bush, he cites "As We May Think" as a key influence in his own thinking:

Stanford Research Institute

Menlo Park, California

May 24, 1962

Dr. Vannevar Bush
Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Dr. Bush:

I wish permission from you to extract lengthy and definitely acknowledged quotes from your article, "As We May Think," that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.  These quotes would appear in a report that I am writing for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and I am sending a parallel request to The Atlantic Monthly.

For your information I am enclosing a relatively brief and quite general writeup describing the program that I am trying to develop here at Stanford Research Institute.  The report which I am writing (and for which I am requesting quotation permission from you) is a detailed description of the conceptual structure that I have developed over the years to orient my pursuit of this objective of increasing the individual human's intellectual effectiveness.  It will also contain a number of examples of the way in which new equipment can lead to new methods and improved effectiveness, to illustrate my more general (but non-numerical) framework, and your article is quite the best that I have found in print to offer examples of this.
I might add that this article of yours has probably influenced me quite basically.  I remember finding it and avidly reading it in a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte, one of the Phillipine [sic] Islands, in the Fall of 1945.

Engelbart goes on to say:

I re-discovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realized how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reading of this article sixteen and a half years ago hadn't had a real influence upon the course of my thoughts and actions (Nyce and Kahn 235).

At a 1972 conference on interactive computing, Ted Nelson, the man who created hypertext, gave a talk titled "As We Will Think." Nelson wrote:

In this paper, an effort in counter-discipleship, I hope to remind readers of what Bush did and did not say, and point out what is not yet recognized: that much of what he predicted is possible now; the Memex is here; the 'trails' he spoke of--suitably generalized, and now called hypertexts--may, and should, become the principal publishing form of the future (Nyce and Kahn 245).

Nelson's postion--that hypertext should be the primary publishing format--is provacative, and it is illustrates again the powerful influence of Vannevar Bush.

Should I Record All My Life Bits?

Aside from influencing some of the key players at the dawn of the internet and computing, the Memex continues to inspire creative projects in the 21st century.  One of the most fascinating is the Microsoft funded, MyLifeBits, which describes itself as "a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort" (MyLifeBits).  In a 2007 article, the creators of the project, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, lay out their vision:

Our team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure. (MyLifeBits)

In addition, Bell and Gemmell argue that:

Digital memories can do more than simply assist the recollection of past events, conversations and projects. Portable sensors can take readings of things that are not even perceived by humans, such as oxygen levels in the blood or the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Computers can then scan these data to identify patterns: for instance, they might determine which environmental conditions worsen a child's asthma...After six years, Bell has amassed a digital archive of more than 300,000 records, taking up about 150 gigabytes of memory (1).

Is this the "fulfillment" of Bush's vision, as the creators suggest, or is this a misguided corruption?  What are the possible emotional pitfalls of human-life-as-database?  If we are not worried about the impact on ourselves then we should ask what our loved ones will do with all this digital stuff once we are gone.  In short, if the dream of the Memex is embodied in MyLifeBits, shouldn't someone ask whether or not this is a good thing?  The creators of the project begin their article by stating "Human memory can be maddeningly elusive" (1).  They go on to argue that, "digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes" (1).

The assumption behind this statement is that humans want to remember everything, that somehow letting memories slip away is a problem.  Don't we need to let certain memories fade?  Isn't the fading of memory part of the healing and learning process?  If I can call up every mistake I have ever made in text or video or audio, I am fairly certain I would go mad.  Bush proposed Memex with the goal of organizing knowledge.  MyLifeBits challenges our idea of knowledge, or at least, self-knowledge.  I do realize that I possess a fairly large archive of email, dating back probably ten years now.  And I know that I rarely consult this archive.  However, what if that archive were more fully integrated into my life?  For example, what happens when our personal history records are merged with everyday knowledge searches?  Google has already stated that they hope to integrate historical newspapers with normal searches, so that your results turn up, essentially, everything (Soni).  Desktop searching has improved dramatically as well, with technologies like Apple's Spotlight constantly indexing every file on your computer.  Will we be able to move forward emotionally when our multimedia past is so accessible?  How will grieving family members deal with fifty years of email, text messages and phone conversations.  The dream of the Memex, as embodied in MyLifeBits and supported by a confluence of other technologies (Google, cheap storage, light and powerful digital camcorders, wide access to broadband and so forth) is not just changing our relationship to our present, but it has the potential to dramatically change our relationship with our past.  Was this what Vannevar Bush hoped for, or have we misinterpreted his dream?  Perhaps it is not a question worth asking.  Like tree roots growing around a large rock, the technology will always find a way to build itself, despite any objections or obstacles.  However, it is our responsibility to take responsibility for our inventions.  Computers have evolved from the distant, impersonal room-sized mystery boxes, to the personal computer and now we are on the brink of intimate computing.

Conclusion

Bush's vision of a "new profession of trail blazers" seems to have manifested itself in the form of Google (and other search technologies).  However, if humans are armed with the intimate technologies of the MyLifeBits project then we all become Google. We all become digital trailblazers, marking trails not of the "common record" but of our own record, which could then be integrated with the common record. Bush described a future researcher in his lab, "His hands are free, and he is not anchored" (6).  Technological optimists always seem to dream of a future in which more and better technology will liberate us from tedious work. MyLifeBits, I argue, will not liberate but shackle humans to their own past. MyLifeBits provides clear evidence that Vannevar Bush's Memex has had wide ranging influence in the world of HCI, but whether or not we ultimately benefit from the dream of the Memex is unclear.

Works Cited

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. “A Digital Life.” Scientific American Feb 2007. 16 Sep 2008.

Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly July 1945.

“Internet Pioneers.” 16 Sep 2008.

“MyLifeBits Project.” 16 Sep 2008.

Nyce, James M., and Paul Kahn. From Memex To Hypertext. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc., 1991.

Soni, P. "Bringing History Online, One Newspaper at a Time." Weblog entry. The Official Google Blog. 9 Sep. 2008. Google, Inc. 9 Sept. 16.

Stefik, Mark, and Cerf, Vinton. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 16 Sep 2008.