It is not a compression algorithm with a psychoacoustic bonus. It is a mathematical model of the limits of your hearing with an encoder bolted on, and every interesting thing about it is in how it decides what you were never going to notice.
It is tempting to describe MP3 as a compression algorithm that happens to use some psychoacoustics. That gets the emphasis exactly backwards. MP3 is a mathematical description of the limits of human hearing, with an encoder attached to act on it. The compression is a consequence. The interesting question was never how small the file gets — it is how the encoder decides which parts of a recording you were never going to notice were missing.
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