Meet the man who made music portable: MP3 format co-inventor in Hyderabad

Speaking with Telangana Today at the event, Prof. Brandenburg shared his experience of being the co-inventor of software that changed the way the world listened to music

Hyderabad: Remember the times when music was downloaded, stored, and shared as MP3 files?

While streaming services and newer formats have become more common, MPEG-1 Audio Layer III — popularly known as MP3 — is still in use due to its compatibility, simplicity, and small file size. The mention of it brings back many memories for a lot of people, especially millennials, who used the format extensively for consuming music before gradually shifting to streaming services.

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One of the fathers of the revolutionary invention that made the storage of music more personal and portable, Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg, was in Hyderabad, attending the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) as one of the speakers.

Speaking with Telangana Today at the event, Prof. Brandenburg shared his experience of being the co-inventor of software that changed the way the world listened to music.

“I still have to pinch myself to believe that our work at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has yielded such results and is still popular to this day,” Brandenburg says, talking about the MP3 format.

Talking about the future in the field of audio technologies, he says: “There is a lot more to be discovered, a lot more to be developed, and a lot more to be invented, since sound is perceived by humans in different ways, based on different factors such as their location, noise in the background, etc.”

When asked about the impact of Artificial Intelligence in the fields of audio engineering and psychoacoustics, he says that at this point, AI is just one of the tools used in developing better sound solutions.

On being asked where India stands in the field of audio engineering, Prof. Brandenburg stresses the importance of introducing more detailed courses on the subject at the college level in universities across the country. He believes that India has a lot of potential to become more prominent in the field of sound engineering at the global level, and that programmes like ICASSP help draw more and more youth toward the field.

“Youth should stick with their fields of interest even if they are not the most popular ones, and always remember to work very hard,” he says when asked to give tips for young Indians interested in sound engineering.

Currently, Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg is working on intelligent headphones for super hearing with his team at Brandenburg Labs, with an aim to enhance human hearing experiences beyond natural capabilities. He also met Oscar-winning music director MM Keeravani during his visit to Hyderabad.

“Meeting the popular music director was great,” he adds before signing off.