To be honest, I expected the article to go that route just from that statement, but refreshingly it didn’t. While valid, the social justice argument is hard to take seriously - audio engineers are people, too, and you can’t expect everyone to be aware of every single one of their biases. Especially not back in the times when MP3 was created.
Still, it would be interesting to read about the technical differences between music in different cultures. As technology spreads in the developing world, accommodating all cultures will grow as an issue.
"It seems they targeted this kind of music which would have been quite typical for XXX during that time."
Or mentioning more specifically that they omitted this kind of music which could explain why it perform poorly in that context.
The quote also reads that they it was designed explicitly for western-european men, the gap between that and "they might have biases toward their own taste" is astronomical.
Wondering what kind of creative expressions have been blocked by the status quo is absolutely social justice. Just admitting that MP3 might be holding back entire cultures or subcultures of music is going to be a big leap for some people.
Luckily, codec developers aren't totally stupid. File formats tend to be defined through their reading operation, not the writing operation. Fraunhofer MP3, LAME and many others went way beyond the initial mp3 reference codec in terms of deciding what parts of the signal are important or not.
Synthetic tests like the "put noise in it, check if it's still evenly distributed in a frequency plot" one the article shows are misleading. I could tweak lame into recreating regular noise sufficiently, while still creating valid MP3 files. The same input probably looks quite different when put through 8hz-mp3 or some early bladeenc (which are similar to the ISO reference codec, and _very_ unlike contemporary LAME's psychoacoustic model).
Optimizing your record studio output to any given codec version is futile for that reason, too: Do you optimize for 1998's MP3 encoding? or 2015's? or Vorbis, AAC (and which of its 2 dozen profiles?), Opus, ...?
You've got an institutionally-accepted construct designed by white European men for their uses, which inadvertently creates a privileged class that implicitly excludes anything that would've been "other" to those designers.
I wouldn't call it an attack, but I'd call it a weird and not well supported (by what's posted here) social justice angle.
Here is an interview with the creator, mostly about the ghost in the mp3 project http://traffic.libsyn.com/dataskeptic/The_Ghost_in_the_MP3.m...
What is the point of this sentence? Any value this may have as a technical or art piece is lost by the random attack on the creators and their race.
I'm not even convinced that it is true. I was under the impression that they chose music specifically that was difficult to compress well.