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Many of us carry around easily pocketable personal music devices that carry upwards of tens of thousands of songs.  Even the smaller devices can hold a few hundred songs.  You no longer have to worry about variety with these kind of numbers.  Now, what if I told you that someday these very same devices will be holding hundreds of thousands, even millions, of songs without an increase in memory size?  Well, some researchers at the University of Rochester are working towards that future.

The Rochester researchers recently unveiled a 20-second music file, a clarinet solo, that was “1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.”  That is 20 seconds of music compressed into less than 1 KB.  If that wasn’t cool enough, the researchers claim that the music quality is very close to “flawless.”  This is an incredible feat considering the degraded sound quality of MP3s.
 
So, how did the researchers achieve such superior sound quality in such a small file?  A computer, of course.  They measured the clarinet’s acoustical attributes and studied how a musician plays it.  Using this data, they built virtual models of a clarinet and a clarinet player.  The computer running the models then listened to a live clarinet performance, recording the virtual instrument and player actions needed to reproduce the sound.  Finally, it used this record to digitally reproduce the live performance.

Right now, the current model structure can only handle one instrument at a time, but the researchers are working towards multiple instruments.  What does that mean for you?  It means that someday you could have digitally reproduced music that takes up little file space and sounds almost as good as the real thing.  Basically, it will make MP3s look and sound like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.  Oh, and of course, it also means the clarinet is little bit cooler (says the former clarinet player).

Read: [Analogik]