Music informatics - Essay Example

Some of the most notable examples of music informatics include iPods, digital audio editors, music information retrieval systems, online music search engines and improvisation of musical performances among others. The essence of music informatics is not only to enable better production and consumption of music, but also to promote crucial comprehension of the nature of music, as well as its related behaviors (Miranda 45). Study of music informatics provides in-depth knowledge of current trends with regard to music.

These trends include both the latest software and hardware music technologies. This essay will review two crucial music informatics, namely, mp3 and SoundHound’s Sound2Sound, addressing fundamental aspects of the informatics technologies applied. These aspects include the use of computer science in both technologies, as well as giving a concise background of both music informatics. Music informatics has become a significant area in production and consumption of music. Firstly, the mp3 technology, otherwise referred to as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, is the music informatics technology that entails using digital technology to encode music files in audio format.

Mp3 is a patent registered under a team of five engineers who discovered the technology. These engineers, namely, Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten and Ernst Eberlein initially designed the MPEG-1 standard before extending it to the MPEG-2 standard. MPEG-1 audio layers I, II and III, which made up the MPEG-1 standard, were accepted as drafts by the ISO/IEC in 1991 and concluded in 1992. Publishing of the final draft took place in 1993, thereby earning the aforementioned engineers full patent rights under ISO/IEC 11172-3:1993[5].

Later in 1995, the engineers created and received patent ISO/IEC 13818-3:1995 for backwards compatible MPEG-2, part 3, which incorporated more bit rates than the earlier certified MPEG-1. The mp3 uses a lossy compression algorithm, which lowers the quantity of data needed to represent an audio recording, but still sounds like the actual duplication of the original uncompressed audio file (Brandenburg and Bosi 15). Most listeners are unable to pinpoint any difference between the original audio music file and the reproduced mp3 file.

The technology employed in creating mp3 uses computer science to compress audio files within a CD. For instance, in a scenario where knowledge of music informatics creates an mp3 file using 128kbit/s the resulting mp3 would only be the size of one eleventh of the original CD source. In addition, computer science or music informatics can be used to reproduce audio files into digital files of either a higher or lower quality. This is typically done by constructing the mp3 file at either higher or lower bit rates respectively.

The compression technology applied in the creation of mp3 files reduces the accuracy of particular parts of sound, which is beyond most people’s auditory resolution capacity. This system of removing rather unimportant parts of a music file is called perceptual coding. The music informatics technology employed in perceptual coding entails the use of psychoacoustic methods to reduce the accuracy of music components that have lower audibility in human beings. The same models can be used to get rid of music components entirely.

Once a reduction of components is done or components discarded, a recording of the remaining information is done in an efficient manner that uses the least amount of space (Miranda 87). When conduction lossy audio encoding is used to create an mp3 file, a trade-off often emerges with regard to the space used and sound quality of the reproduced music file. The music