Karlheinz Brandenburg

Karlheinz Brandenburg (born 20 June 1954) is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser (former Institutes Director of Fraunhofer IIS), Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp (all Fraunhofer IIS), he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director. Brandenburg has been called the "father of the MP3" format. Biography Brandenburg received a Dipl. Ing. degree from Erlangen University in Electrical Engineering (1980) as well as a Dipl. Math. degree in Mathematics (1982). In 1989, he obtained his PhD from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Electrical Engineering for his work on digital audio coding and perceptual measurement techniques. Brandenburg's PhD advisor was Professor Dieter Seitzer, an expert in psychoacoustics. In the early 1980s, Seitzer had a pet project that he called a "digital jukebox." He envisioned a system where people could connect to a central server and hear music on demand over ISDN phone lines. But the bandwidth of ISDN is an order of magnitude too narrow for transmission of CD-quality digital audio. A standard compact disc uses linear pulse code modulation (PCM) with 16 bits per sample per channel, at 44,100 samples per second. This means that it takes about 1.4 million bits to encode a single second of stereo audio. To send music over ISDN at playback speed, Seitzer would need to compress the file down by a factor of almost 12-to-1. Seitzer had applied for a patent on his pet project, but his application was rejected on the grounds that what he was trying to do was "impossible." Seitzer assigned Brandenburg the task of investigating the feasibility of 12-to-1 audio compression.