Did he destroy the music industry, as the Indian-British entrepreneur and Internet visionary Ricky Adar predicted in 1994?

Certainly not, because that was not the intention when the Fraunhofer team in Erlangen came up with the idea at the end of the 1980s of compressing digital music to such an extent that it would still meet the demands of music lovers, but could be transmitted via ISDN lines.

However, in 1992, the technology was recognized by the international standardization committee MPEG (“Motion Picture Experts Group”) as the coding standard MPEG Audio Layer 3 („mp3"). In the following years, the Internet increasingly developed into the communication infrastructure of the masses. And so the way to store music in the form of very compact files instead of on so-called recording media such as vinyl records, cassettes or CDs became increasingly popular. Although this did not end up destroying the music industry, it did lead to a disruptive change in the way music is consumed and distributed.

The development and the resulting success story enabled the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to open its own institute for this field of research in Ilmenau/Thuringia, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT. Brandenburg directed the Fraunhofer IDMT from 2004 to 2019. Today the institute works on AI-based classification processes for audio and video data for improved industrial quality control and for applications in the fields of broadcast and online media.

But even after retiring as a Professor at Ilmenau Technical University and leaving the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Karlheinz Brandenburg did not stop working. In 2019, he founded the company “Brandenburg Labs” in Ilmenau, where he has since been working with a young international team on some of his technological visions for audio playback technology.

This includes “immersive audio solutions”, which make listening through headphones almost indistinguishable from real sound environments. However, the aim is not only to reproduce realistic soundscapes, but also to enhance human hearing with appropriate technologies, wearables and intuitive user interfaces that allow users to interact with sound sources in such a way that sounds and noises can be individually faded out, amplified, shifted or adjusted.

In an interview with Fraunhofer, Karlheinz Brandenburg talks about his past, present and future work.

»Beyond mp3«

Karlheinz Brandenburg on his new project

The Interview