10 Songs That Changed Music Forever
3. Suzanne Vega - Tom’s Diner (1987)
Folk singer Vega wrote ‘Tom’s Diner’ in 1982 as an a capella track a long time before it was ever released - it got air on an obscure compilation record two years later, and saw life on her second album in 1987.
It’s a nice song, if a little slight, a tune which received significant airplay in 1990 when it remixed as a dance track by the DNA Disciples and became a worldwide hit. It’s the original vocal-only version which makes this list, however.
Audiophiles had been using Vega’s tune as a speaker test track for years, citing it as a great example of a warm vocal recording that could, potentially, reveal problems with a HiFi set-up. German audio engineer Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, part of the team at the Fraunhofer Society engaged in developing the MP3 compression format, also used the song to tune his system and make sure that the result would actually be listenable.
Initially, it was not: it sounded distorted, apparently very much like the voice they mocked up for the possessed child in The Exorcist. Brandenburg refined his set-up over months, reasoning that if the MP3 could retain the warmth and purity of Vega’s voice on ‘Tom’s Diner’, it could provide a quality reproduction of any song at a compressed size.
Those tests led to the most widely used codec in the world. It’s the reason why some call Vega ‘the mother of the MP3’: the format whose popularity helped to bring about the digital music revolution.