Here's the visual for how the WAV & MP3 versions of this song compare now: After many hours of encoding, listening, and a subsequent rebellion from the now unwilling listening subjects, the team succeeded. As a result, the new program test material for the MP3 became Suzanne Vega's song 'Tom's Diner'. It was too harsh on an isolated human voice, with initial encodings sounding like 'rats scratching at the tape'. Eventually, the algorithm could encode a recording of an entire orchestra without a hitch, but it had one problem. After each new iteration of the algorithm, they would run listening tests to assess transparency. The name of the game was eliminating imperceptible and redundant information by studying our perception. They had built the algorithm for the MP3 on the backbone of Eberhard Zwicker's work in psychoacoustics. Led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, the Fraunhofer team entered the contest. With several possibilities in mind, the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) put out a call for a 12:1 data compression algorithm in the early 90s, with stipulations of 'transparency' being key and promised endorsements for the winner. Initial ideas for a compression algorithm already hinted at music streaming long before many of us could conceptualize the premise. This immutable file size initially made it impossible to distribute music in anything other than a tangible format, but the scientific community understood the impact of reducing the file size. A 3-minute WAV of pure silence will be the same size as a 3-minute WAV of white noise. The WAV file is a lossless recreation of an acoustic recording. While recording in digital allowed for instantaneous punch-ins, virtually limitless takes, and edits that were staggeringly simple to execute, the WAV file became the gold standard for CD distribution and the MP3s spread in the subterranean and burgeoning world of the internet was the second wave of the tsunami. Digitization was like an earthquake to the prior stability of the music industry, both on the recording side and on the distribution side. To this day, however, few things have been quite as impactful as the digitization of music.

The typical length of a single and an album were initially set by the limitations of vinyl, the frequency response is largely shaped by the recording medium, and our effects have slowly morphed through the acoustic, mechanical, electrical, and digital domains. The art is inherently limited by the technology used to create it, more so than in most art forms.

Song format on floppy disk