The MP3 developers who keep constantly upgrading their offerings to incorporate a longer play list might not like reading this piece of information. Sadly for them and gladly for the rest of us, a future where even a 1KB music file would exist is not that distant. This is thanks to researchers from the University of Rochester who believe that such a music file would indeed exist and that too at a sound quality better than your current MP3 player has to offer.
The group uses a computer that measures a clarinet’s acoustical attributes and also studies the way a musician plays it. This data is then used to build virtual models of a clarinet and a clarinet player. A live clarinet at play was then made accessible to this computer, which recorded the virtual instrument and player actions needed to reproduce the sound. Eventually, the live performance was digitally reproduced thereby facilitating the compression. The current status of this development is that this group has succeeded in creating a 20-second music file which was a clarinet solo - 10,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file. For the record, it was a 20-second music file that measured a single KB. The technology can only handle one instrument at a time and at the moment it is only the clarinet, but they are working toward multiple instruments.
Via: GadgetTell
