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

[The Sarai Programme]

Dear all,

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites you to a lecture on *'MP3:
>From Infrastructure for Format and Back Again'* by *Jonathan Sterne*,
on *Tuesday,
January 13, 2015, 5 pm*, at CSDS Seminar Room, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054.

Ravi Vasudevan will chair the session.

Please join us for tea at 4.30 pm, and RSVP by telephone (011 2394 2199) or
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.

Regards,

Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
http://www.csds.in/praveen.rai