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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

The author posts clips like "Example 1. White, Pink, and Brown Noise - Uncompressed", but the audio files are hosted on SoundCloud. My experience on SoundCloud is that no matter what format you upload as, they always stream it down to you as a 128 kb/s MP3 or something like that. I think the author is better off self-hosting the WAV files?

> Listening tests, primarily designed by and for western-european men, and using the music they liked, were used to refine the encoder.

> As previously stated, the MP3 codec was refined using listening tests designed by european audio engineers and featuring the music they chose. In a sense, each of these songs acts as a resonant filter for every file encoded in the MP3 format.

Through a simple accusation of racial bias, the author seeks to undermine the technical work that went into the development of the MP3 codec.

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I read a paper that asserted that the internet was racist against SE Asian people because it didn't have support for eastern languages out of the box.

Never mind that the Chinese still have not completely made up their minds about exactly how to represent their language in digital form. It is ludicrous to think that in the 1960s they could have somehow anticipated how Chinese people wanted to communicate in digital form, and just have support for that. Essentially invent Unicode first.

Of course the authors don't understand any of that, they just saw that there were limits of how Chinese characters could be represented digitally (this was in 2012) and they took an ignorant and antagonistic tone, and threw out accusations of a racist conspiracy by ISO and ASCII. And this paper was part of a curriculum at a major university.

Accusations like this are almost always wrong, and actually damaging. In today's climate, it is especially damaging to throw out accusations of racism.

I can not imagine how the designers of MP3 could have satisfied this person. The had to start somewhere. They had to start with what they knew, and work their way out, which they did.

Text started out being only upper case only, and then lowercase and extended western characters, and then more complexity was added over the years. Photo codecs started out calibrated for Lenna[1], so that they would have a common reference, and worked from there. Were they supposed to be able to perfectly capture every skin tone, all at once, the first time? Should they have started with a picture of a non-white person first? What ethnicity then?

This kind of antagonistic critical mentality is toxic, and should just be dismissed without consideration. At this point, if someone says that some technology is racist, I assume they are a grifter and ignore them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

> Through a simple accusation of racial bias, the author seeks to undermine the technical work that went into the development of the MP3 codec

Even at the time of writing of the article, MP3 was being replaced with much better codecs. It could be said that when the codec was being developed in the 90s, they chose a limited set of music to make the problem easier to solve - which is fair given that decoding was at the limits of processing power at the time. But it's likely they stuck with music on the chromatic scale, and instruments with unusual timbres and microtonal variations, where exceptions to this were usually outside the western canon, though I think that has changed since the 90s with the advent of more sophisticated electronic music and more experimental artists.

I found the report on the listening test, but I could not find a list of the 20-second excerpts they used:

https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/audio/public/w14...

The ways in which biases can be encoded in an algorithm are not trivial. The author takes pains to describe how the lossiness of MP3 encoding is audible. The codec's authors made aesthetic decisions, shaped by their own taste, to determine what sounds could be acceptably removed from the audio. That should be a significant point in almost any discussion of MP3. The author of this piece does not, however, challenge the technical merit of the codec, as you claim. Instead, its biases are simply acknowledged and plainly described.

I for one find the idea that there is a "white" way to hear music to be pretty offensive. Does he have any evidence for his race-realist perspective? I wish we could move past these outdated ideas.

Of course mp3 is limited by the people who made it, everything is. It certainly wasn't done with any bad intentions.

That is cultural bias. It is just easier to play the other card and get attention.

> The author takes pains to describe how the lossiness of MP3 encoding is audible.

> Its biases are simply acknowledged and plainly described.

Not at all. The author attempts to show the residue of white/pink/brown noise and of a couple of famous test clips (the ones that could be labelled as European). The author makes no attempt to compare or show that MP3 has worse artifacts on non-European music. Great job there. That's why I find the racial accusation to be out of place.

I should note that I've done subtractive analysis of MP3 and Vorbis before, so I've seen the results of my test samples as well. Briefly, I found that MP3 has more tonal residue, whereas Vorbis sounds more like noise. The post-masking residue on Vorbis is stronger.

> Through a simple accusation of racial bias, the author seeks to undermine the technical work that went into the development of the MP3 codec.

I'm always surprised when pointing out that something has design limits, and often limits imposed by racial bias in testing, is seen as such an evil thing. Acknowledging the limits is the first part of making use of something properly, wouldn't you say? Understanding that MP3 is likely (Although it would have to be confirmed via testing) to have poorer encoding on non-white artforms is important to choosing a media encoding, no?

I'm not sure how acknowledging the limits they created is "undermining the work that went into it", can you explain why you feel that is the case?

> non-white artforms

You Americans (I'm assuming) are really strange. Dividing the world into white and non-white art forms, white and non-white "ways of knowing" etc. is exactly how the Nazis and fascists thought here in Europe. You are going right back into the same divisive state of affairs.

Don't assume we all do it. Identity politics is used to get people to ignore class politics. It is driven primarily by the left-leaning political factions.

> exactly how the Nazis and fascists thought here in Europe

Yes, we know. That's why we wound up with an orange man who didn't really care about race.

> You are going right back into the same divisive state of affairs.

Division allows the elites to control the masses more efficiently. It's like "divided we fall" might be true or something.

Prepare to see the division tear the United States in half. That's the goal, anyway.

> Identity politics is used to get people to ignore class politics. It is driven primarily by the left-leaning political factions.

That's amusing, because most of the people of colour I follow on the Fediverse give class-based intersectional analyses of political happenings. In most leftist circles, identity politics has been seamlessly merged with class politics in an effort to ensure that class politics serves the purpose of uplifting all lower class people, rather than just the white lower classes, and in an effort to eliminate discrimination and mistreatment of all kinds. This is the purpose of any form of left-wing ideology.

Indeed, Tony Cliff wrote on the topic of class and intersectionality back in the 1970s*, it isn't a new thing -- certainly not new to academic socialist circles. It is simply only recently that it has entered the majority consciousness. One can see that intersectional analysis does not conflict with class analysis, but compliments it and allows one better lenses by which to view the various conflicts and struggles in the modern world (or indeed, many of the struggles of the 20th century). See the unity he seeks by adding the lense of intersectionality, and see the error in your assessment that "Intersectional Analysis" is somehow adverse to and conflicts with "Class Analysis", I beg of you.

* - https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1978/08/gays.ht...

First thing is, I am not an American. I am a White Welsh person. That said, there is significant systemic inequality in western countries, that is often racially biased. This is what is meant by "intersectionality". The other response talks in terms of "class warfare" and it is important to note that the whole reason Intersectionality arose as a concept was because "upholding women" often meant "upholding white women", and "upholding lower class workers" often led to measures that did not consider people of colour, and therefore led to them being more disadvantaged. You cannot view oppression purely in terms of class, when you do, voices are unheard and lost.

Because of the cultural split, enforced by said systemic inequality, there is a cultural difference. It would be foolish and ignorant to ignore that difference and claim that it doesn't exist. Indeed, "Colour Blindness" as you are proposing, has been outed as racist ideology for over half a century (Jane Elliot explains this rather well). By ignoring the fact that people have different skin tone, and have been disadvantaged by it, you are choosing to ignore their very existence. If the entire human race were "homogenized" there would be much of value that is lost. Likewise, when we talk in terms of "white people" and "people of colour", we are simply recognizing and acknowledging the split that comes from that disadvantage that still exists -- in terms of the original argument, we are recognizing that this specific encoding of sound information is likely biased to encode white culture, white art, better. That is a difference that should be corrected, and to correct it we need to acknowledge it first.

In summary, I'm simply following the terminology given to me by people of colour, who often talk in these terms. The best I can do is follow their example and speak out in the manner that they have taught, or (better still) promote their voices on these matters.

I didn't really get that impression that the author was seeking to do that, to be honest. I think he was interested in the context developing the codec and how that influences the media that can be produced/expressed.

This isn't "racial bias" and has nothing do with race, but the types of music MP3 developers, who were western men, decided to use as a reference. Famously, Karlheinz Brandenburg focused on making 'Tom's Diner' sound good, which suggests the mp3 model is strongly optimized to rock music and, as others have claimed, sounds sub-optimal when encoding non-Western music.

Your comment was good until you got into an unfounded and reactionary "reverse racism" accusation.

I read somewhere that Tom's Diner is used for lossy audio codec evaluations because it is a clear, strong a capella voice. It's been said that humans are sensitive to even minor distortions in vocal quality. You can sing a capella in any language, and it is not limited to western music. Sorry, I don't have references to offer.

The line "I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice", a quote from MP3 author Karlheinz Brandenburg, first appeared in the article 'Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter' [1] by Hilmar Schmundt, published June 2000 in the magazine eCompany Now, a year before that magazine merged with its rival Business 2.0.

(The Wikipedia article on Tom's Diner says anachronistically that the quote appeared in Business 2.0 magazine. This has been present on the page since the very first revision [2].)

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20001003052745/http://www.ecompan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tom%27s_Diner&old...

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