Electrical engineer James D. Johnston, a Morris Township resident, has been called the father of perceptual audio coding for his work in audio sound at AT&T Bell Laboratories since 1976. Today, he is a technology leader at AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park. His work has enabled the distribution of digital music over the Internet as well as digital radio.

Throughout the 1990s, Johnston invented a number of basic techniques which are used in perceptual audio coding and especially in Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Layer-3 (also referred to as MP3) and MPEG Layer-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). MPEG (pronounced M-peg), is the name of the family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format. AAC is an audio compression format that is more efficient than MP3.

The major advantage of MPEG files compared to other video and audio coding formats is that MPEG files are much smaller for the same quality of sounds and images because they use sophisticated compression techniques. Johnston is hailed for making files smaller because he found a way to reduce the bit rate needed for transmission or storage of audio by a factor of ten or greater. Seven of Johnston's patents related to this new technology were filed from 1991 to 1997. Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, now owns them.

MP3 has been the motor of change for the music industry. A large number of new Internet companies use the technology which has emerged from this work as the foundation of the electronic music distribution business. Sales of products directly based on MP3 technology, like AAC players and jukebox systems, are estimated to reach $1 billion this year and at least double that sum next year.

Johnston was born in northeastern Ohio. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in electrical engineering with side interests in mathematics, radio broadcasting and coherent image signal processing. He is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, a senior member of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, and has published more than 50 technical papers and has been awarded more than 20 U.S. patents.