> Through a simple accusation of racial bias, the author seeks to undermine the technical work that went into the development of the MP3 codec Even at the time

> Through a simple accusation of racial bias, the author seeks to undermine the technical work that went into the development of the MP3 codec Even at the time of writing of the article, MP3 was being replaced with much better codecs. It could be said that when the codec was being developed in the 90s, they chose a limited set of music to make the problem easier to solve - which is fair given that decoding was at the limits of processing power at the time. But it's likely they stuck with music on the chromatic scale, and instruments with unusual timbres and microtonal variations, where exceptions to this were usually outside the western canon, though I think that has changed since the 90s with the advent of more sophisticated electronic music and more experimental artists. I found the report on the listening test, but I could not find a list of the 20-second excerpts they used: https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/audio/public/w1419.pdf https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/audio/public/w14...