In media culture, the year 1984 is remembered for the famous commercial that introduced Apple Computer’s Macintosh machine, which transformed the concept of personal computing. That same year saw another barrier broken and new door opened when the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 4,472,747 on September 18, 1984, to David Schwartz, President of Schwartz Engineering & Design, the leader in optical microphone design, just weeks before the 76th AES Convention was to convene in New York City. Schwartz’s patent was for what we now know as an audio data compression codec – an algorithm used to reduce the size of a digital file, enabling it to be transmitted and stored more efficiently, yet played back with virtually no significant effect on the quality of the recorded music. When Schwartz’s company, CompuSonics, Inc., debuted the concept, described in key technical papers presented by him and his associates to the AES, the world quietly, but irrevocably, was changed forever. The foundations for MP3, for music downloading, for digital personal music playback devices and other aspects of a digital culture we now take for granted, were firmly established.

The seeds of the digital music revolution can be found in key technical papers written and delivered by Schwartz and his colleagues that year. "High Speed Telecommunications Interface for Digital Audio Transmission and Reception," by Hyun Heinz Sohn, proposed what would have been considered at the time a high-speed 56-kb/s digital interface for AT&T’s early T1-type Accunet system. "Strategies for the Representation and Data Reduction of Digital Music Signals," by John Stautner, a Vice President at CompuSonics, discussed the reduction algorithmically of the size of music files to facilitate their transmission and storage. Schwartz’s own "Specifications and Implementation of a Computer Audio Console for Digital Mixing and Recording" outlined the specifications and implementation of a multi-processor computer configured as a console for the digital mixing and recording of music. These critical technical papers and Schwartz’s key patent prefigured the work that would take place at Bell Labs in the U.S. and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany that would ultimately be established as the MP3 file format standard. As a member of the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) of the American National Standards Group in 1990 and 1991, he served on the MPEG Audio subcommittee, where the various layers – including Layer 3, which would become famous as MP3 -- were defined. But well before the MP3 was awarded ISO certification in 1991, and before its first commercial applications in 1994, Schwartz had been working closely with associates at MIT and UC Berkeley, as well as with chipmaker Texas Instruments, which provided the first chip that could perform a real-time Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), the hardware basis for the data compression process for music.

It would be years before the picture that is the new landscape of digital media would become clear, but it was in 1984 that the first pieces began to fall into place, right here, in New York, at the 76th AES Convention 25 years ago. Today, as Schwartz introduces a new laser-based microphone technology that is every bit as revolutionary as the data compression format he developed 25 years ago, he still regards the past as prologue. "The process of innovation is a magical combination of inspiration and hard work, as well as knowing your own limitations and when you need to collaborate to make something happen," he says. "Looking back, no one could have foreseen what music in the form of a file would mean to our lives."