"A new kind of cine-love"
TLS June 7 2013 from John Ridpath's review of Jonathan Sterne's MP3: The meaning of a format , Gabriele Pedulla's In Broad Daylight: Movies and spectators after the cinema , and J. Hoberman's Film After Film: or, what became of 21st century cinema : AT&T's groundbreaking psychoacoustic research was designed with a commercial imperative in mind: to maximize bandwidth on telephone lines. By only reproducing sounds that were audible to human hearing, the company managed to quadruple its capacity by 1920s. As the twentieth century progressed, various psychoacoustic researchers turned their attention to exploiting gaps within the audible spectrum, such as those caused when one sound is rendered inaudible by a similar one that is louder (a phenomenon known as masking). Such research contributed directly to the creation of "perceptual coders": algorithms designed to compress audio by removing inaudible sounds. As part of a drive by ISO and IEC to crea...