HALL OF FAME FOR MP3 INVENTORS

The Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) has elected Dr. Dieter Seitzer, Dr. Heinz Gerhaeuser and Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, representing a team of Fraunhofer researchers, into the CE Hall of Fame last month. The award honors their work on inventing and introducing the mp3 compression format. To recognize the contributions of true pioneers of consumer electronics industry, CEA annually announces another world-class group of inventors, engineers, business leaders, retailers and journalists to be inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

Seitzer, Gerhaeuser and Brandenburg are well known for their seminal work in digital audio coding exploiting the properties of the human hearing process. Still, they represent a large team of researchers and engineers involved in the mp3 development.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Dieter Seitzer had the basic idea to compress audio data and to transmit music in high quality over phone lines. Seitzer (73) was the founding director of Fraunhofer Insitute for Integrated Circuits IIS, which he headed from 1985 to 1998. Dr. Heinz Gerhäuser was directly involved in the development of real-time implementations of mp3 predecessors. Following Dr. Seitzer, Gerhäuser (60) led the Institute to the largest and most successful of the 56 Fraunhofer Institutes. In his Ph. D. work, Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg laid the foundation for development of mp3 and many other modern audio coding schemes. Today, the 52 year old heads the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany.

Mp3 is more than just a technology; it is a phenomenon that connects musicians with music lovers and artists with their audience. For a glance at the mp3 history including videocasts of the inventors, please visit the link below.

  www.mp3-history.com