Recovering the Lossiness of 'Tom’s Diner'

recording at the rock show

Sergio Alejandro Ortiz (CC0)

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Most music delivered to our ears digitally is “lossy,” in the parlance of engineers. The MP3 audio format we’re typically listening to compresses the audio so that the file becomes 75 to 95 percent smaller. This means that an MP3 file takes up much less space on our device, but also means that we’re losing some of the music. Kenneth Goldsmith—a conceptual artist and the author of “Wasting Time on the Internet”—talks more about what we lose when we listen to digital music.