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Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression
zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."
Got to yet read this article, but do u people wonder the same for other things like .wma/.ogg for audio or for that matter .jpeg/.mpeg for video... i guess such studies will soon follow too !!!
'But a continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences' How? Why? Nowhere else in the article is even the start of a reason for this statement. I at least expected to see something along the lines of not hearing that semi while crossing the street. Remember, MP3s, along with marijuana, can kill you.
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
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" I have however some computer games with MP3 music, but I don't excessively play them. Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus (and thus I also suspect the data reduction in radio and TV broadcasts as a cause)"
This guy seemed intelligent all the way up to the point where he wrote that particular line. If it only took that little of exposure to lossy sound caused him to have tinitus, then why aren't people by the millions complaining of hearing problems? I'm quite surprised he'd attribute his hearing problems to his hypothesis. I think it is far more likely there are other causes of his problems.
I also don't think, from what I've read here, that we're in any real danger of suffering noticable hearing damage from MP3s. The the main reason is that we don't listen to just MP3s 24 hours a day. Not even close! We'll be surrounded by compressed sound for years to come, but it'll never replace the natural every day sounds we hear all the time. Right now, as I write this, I can hear things happening all around me that definitely are not digital. As long as that noise is there, I can't imagine that our brain would focus in on the compressed sound itself.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up against real world data.
I must just note, as others have, that there is a reason that peer reviewed, scientific journals exist. When a doctor does study this, get it reviewed and published and the confirmed by other studies (or maybe after extensive meta-analysis) I might begin to believe it.
YESTERDAY: eggs make you live 20 extra years--eat a lot
TODAY: eggs will kill you
TOMORROW: eggs will make you live 30 extra years--eat a lot.
Ha. Medical science.
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
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wonder how much RIAA paid them to publish this ridiculous garbage.
how about if the original signal was just totally poor quality (think cassette tapes). would this damage hearing also?
lame lame lame excuse for quality publishing.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Since he basically said that he feels bad hearing is a reasonable price to pay for toppling the recording industry. And that any problems could be averted by some simple hacks without increasing filesize.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow, the editors of Slashdot accepted this bullshit but rejected 20 or so of my submissions? At least I wasn't full of shit.
This is just ridiculous bull crap. So is the brief mention of "subliminal messages". Normally, I would elaborate further and explain, but on this I think not. Anyone stupid enough to not immediately realize that this is bullshit is beyond reason anyways.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I stopped reading after he started going on about dictators slipping propaganda into the inaudible cracks in your media.
And it started off with such promising analysis! I bet the slashdot moderators didn't read to the bottom of the article before approving it.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
This guy did little more than quote a college biology book, and scan the pictures to create a web site. On first reading the article I thought to myself, "funny, it doesn't feel like April first."
Also, even if we give this guy the benefit of doubt for a moment, there is still nothing to worry about. When was the last time you listened to MP3's and/or video games in a completely soundless environment for an extended period of time? Last few times I did it, I was at home with the refidgerator humming away, a few computer fans whirring, my chair creaking occasionally, simply put, I had lots of background noise for my ears to filter out, without my speakers adding to it. Sure, I would love to put a sensory depravation tank around my computer when playing Thief, it can really blow yuor concentration when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email. But, I don't have one, and so am bombarded with small, often inaudiable sounds.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
There are far better things for that money to be spent researching. Don't waste it on junk like this.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
One only has to scroll to the end of the article to see what pseudo-religion this person is pushing:
(teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
While reading this story, ironically enough, I played an MP3 I had downloaded from Gnucleus (a Gnutella client) using a multi-host download. One of the hosts seems to have been one of the RIAA servers that sends out static; for a few seconds in the middle of the song, there's this horrible (loud) clicking and popping. I have no desire to be the one to try it, but how cool would it be if I sued them for damage to my ears (when listening to the MP3 I downloaded from them) and won. It's actually not as ridiculous as it might sound -- if I steal a candy bar, and it turns out to have cyanide and razor blades in it, I'm almost positive that I could still sue / file criminal charges -- you can't 'booby trap' things if they cause injury.
As I said, it's a stretch, but I'd love to see the RIAA ordered to pay a tremendous fine for causing hearing loss / damage to speakers.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"MP3 and other lossy codecs fool our ears, and unlike our eyes, our ears require constant re-calibration to function properly. If we are calibrating to inaccurate/unnatural sounds, he thinks this could be a concern."
Hmm, are you so sure about that? It is entirely possible that our eyes require very similar forms of calibration, but that we have not even theorized the existence(sp?) of such a problem b/c we don't spend nearly as much time watching lossily encoded images as we spend listening to lossily encoded sounds. Is it possible that a form of this could partially account for eye-strain from staring at a monitor for hours on end? (I personally don't suffer from it, but I know many people who do) Something like this would be worth investigation...
I did read the article, all of it, and got the impression that he was grasping at any explanation for his own hearing problems, so long as it meant that there was nothing wrong with HIM -- ie. he wants an excuse for the cause to be external. Not aging, not cumulative exposure to loud or white noise, but something he could quantify and point a finger at.
While I understand his point, as you say if it were true, it should equally cause permanent vision loss from watching TV or even a pixelated medium like a computer screen or 4-colour photos in the newspaper.
IOW, if what you don't hear causes hearing loss due to futzing with the brain's calibration mechanism, then what you don't see should cause vision loss for the same reason. It doesn't wash.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
YES! I recently noticed that I have low level tinnitus. I recently moved to the US. Concidence? In the US there is much more caffeine in Cola beverages than in Canada. I have been intaking probably 2x more caffeine than I used to. I have noticed in the last few months that I have low low level tinnitus. Any noise is louder than it, including the sound of blood rushing thru my ears. I have yet to quit caffeine, but I think it will help significantly.
I listen to headphones at resonable volumes, I don't work in industries which have hearing-loss danger, and I don't go to bars or concerts or other loud events very often. My hearing is still great. But this low tinnitus only when its completely and utterly quiet.
So to respond to the original article: Do you drink cola drinks? Coffee? Try quitting caffeine and maybe your tinnitus will go away. And you can still listen to mp3s.
PS: If you read medical sites and other tinnitus support sites, they all say that caffeine aggrivates tinnitus because it constricts blood vessels in the ear. Quit caffine!!
All kinds of music recordings are compressed. When the CD appeared, people complained that the sound was improperly encoded, and that quality was lost over vinyl. CD's use compressed music too. People in the music industry (and who use Digital Audio Tapes in studios) can actually tell the difference between DAT and CD... So we'd be deaf because of CD's too.
Plus, when I listen to MP3's (computer plugged to hi-fi speakers) the sound echoes everywhere, produce some vibrations on wooden furniture... I guess this produces just enough "real", distorted signals for my ear to "recalibrate"?
What IS making me deaf, indeed, is the stupid 12-cm fan in the stupid Powermacintosh G4...
Hmm, did you READ the article?
...
He says
I read it, and I don't buy a word of it. The grammar is faulty. Lay+out is make-believe at most. Pictures are from some first anatomy book. No references, just some weird hypothesis withou any proofs. Sounds like a hoax if I ever saw one.
Besides he even fails to mention most Fourier transform based codecs work. They do not even fullfill the persumptions of his hypothesis, because their main size reductions are based on sliced away frequencies outside the scope of our hearing.
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