Thirty-six years ago today marked the birth of the MPEG-Audio group. The initial two characters of MPEG – M (oving) and the P (icture) – leave no doubt about the original public intentions in setting up the MPEG group which had met for the first time in Ottawa, ON on 10-12 May. My real intentions, however, were very clear in my mind since the very beginning (actually, they dated back several years before): an audio-visual  system had to be specified as a complete system not as an integration of two independently specified audio and visual systems.

Some 30 audio experts participated in the first meeting held at the Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik und Informationsverarbeitung at the Universität Hannover headed by Prof. Hans Georg Musmann. Gathering so many audio coding experts was quite an achievement because, unlike video and speech coding for which there were well established communities developing technologies with a long tradition in standardisation – myself being an element of it – audio coding was a field where the number of researchers was more limited and scattered in a reduced number of places, the research establishment of ATT, CCETT, IRT, JVC, Matsushita, Philips, Sony, Thomson, some universities and a few others.

The meeting was chaired by Hans Musmann whom I had contacted before. I knew him because we had been involved in several common initiatives before. The Hannover meeting gave attending researchers the opportunity to listen, in some cases for the first time, to the audio coding results of their peers.

So the first MPEG subgroup – Audio – was born and Prof. Musmann was appointed as its chairman. The Video subgroup was established later. The out of the meeting was a document inviting interested parties to pre-register their intention to submit proposals for video and audio coding algorithms when MPEG would issue a Call for Proposals.