[Reader-list] Lecture by Jonathan Sterne on 'MP3: From Infrastructure for Format and Back Again'

[The Sarai Programme]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a lecture



*MP3:*

*From Infrastructure for Format and Back Again*

by *Jonathan Sterne*



*Ravi Vasudevan *will Chair

Tuesday, 13 January 2015, 5 pm
    RSVP

CSDS Seminar Room,
                       Tel: 011 23942199

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054
                       Fax: 011 23943450

Please join us for tea at 4.30 pm
                                                email: jaya at csds.in





The lecture will reflect on the hundred-year history of the world's most
common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of
the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the
larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing
research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the
mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the
MP3), to the format's promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s.



*Jonathan Sterne* is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and
Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at
McGill University.  He is author of *MP3: The Meaning of a Format *(2012), *The
Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction *(2003); and numerous
articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture.  He is also
editor of*The Sound Studies Reader *(Routledge, 2012).  His new projects
consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing;
and the intersections of disability, technology and perception.



*Ravi Vasudevan *is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies.