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And there is the famous story of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” the song used by audio engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg to fine-tune the MP3 encoder. Brandenburg was putting the finishing touches on his compression algorithm when he heard Vega’s hit playing down the hallway. “I was electrified,” he later explained. “I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.” He listened to the song thousands of times, eventually figuring out a way to convert it into an MP3 while preserving the warmth of her performance. As reporter Hilmar Schmundt remarks, in an article noted by Sterne: “When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”
