Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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A Brief History of Sound Recording
Object 32 of 36
The Ghost in the MP3 (2014, 2:10)
Ryan Maguire | Virgina Commonwealth University

All the sounds stripped out of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" when it was encoded as an MP3. A brilliant bit of reverse-engineered psychoacoustics by the American artist Ryan Maguire in 2014, now part of our Permanent Collection of Sounds.

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Museum of Portable Sound's "A Brief History of Sound Recording: Fully Incomplete and Highly Biased" is a new gallery guide book that is also a standalone history of recorded audio.

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