Expansion artifacts

The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression, ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and the algorithms that make them work, wouldn’t be possible without it. From the very first studies into compression (at Bell Labs in the 1940s), researchers knew they’d have to accept a tradeoff: you can achieve smaller file sizes if you’re willing to accept some loss of the original data. This seems counterproductive, since the whole idea is to reproduce the data, but scientists found ways to only discard information that is imperceptible to humans. Our ears and brains tend to ‘filter out’ quiet sounds overshadowed by loud sounds. MP3s take advantage of this blind spot by stripping out the quiet bits we wouldn’t be likely to hear anyway. Our eyes and…