Singer/Songwriter Suzanne Vega is the mother of Ruby Froom. She is also the mother of the MP3.
Vega became the MP3's mother unintentionally. Her song 'Tom's Diner' was the audio track used to perfect the algorithm."The men who were working on MP3 were these German men from an institute called the Fraunhofer," she tells Undercover News. "They used my version of 'Tom's Diner', the original one, because they heard that that's how people tested their speakers. You could tell right away if there was any distortion because it was just a single voice. They tried running 'Tom's Diner' through the MP3 that they created and there were all of these terrible distortions on the vocal. They thought they had it to the point where they were recreating sounds faithfully but they found out when they put 'Tom's Diner' there that it wasn't the case. They kept running it through and it took a few months of running 'Tom's Diner' through the MP3 before they refined it".
That was in the early '90s. This year, Suzanne got to meet "the dad". "I went there earlier this year and they showed me what it sounded like in the beginning," she said. "It sounded monstrous and weird with the distortions. Afterwards they were able to recreate it pretty faithfully. An article later said anytime you hear an MP3 it is the combination of Karl Brandenburg's ears and Suzanne Vega's voice. I guess that makes him the father, me the mother and MP3 is the baby".
Suzanne is surrounded by new technology achievements, moreso by accident than planning. She was also the first musician ever to perform live on Second Life, the internet-based reality world.
"I had done a lot of work with a radio show called The Infinite Mind," she says. "They called me up and said they were going to host a concert on Second Life and wanted me to be the performer. To be honest, I had never heard of Second Life. I didn't know what they were talking about. I had heard about avatars but it wasn't until I saw my own avatar that I understood what we were doing. We went to a radio station where I actually did perform with my guitar into a microphone and someone operated by avatar at the same time. It was a very interesting experience having this performance in a room in cyberspace with all of these other avatars. It was like a dream that you have with a whole bunch of other people".
Suzanne Vega will tour Australia in 2008.
Dates are:
January 27 - Gold Coast, Jupiters
January 30 - Sydney, Lyric Theatre
February 1 - Melbourne, The Palms
February 5 - Perth, Burswood Theatre
