Hans Georg Musmann was born in 1935. He received the Dipl.-Ing degree in Electrical Engineering in 1962, and the Dr.-Ing. degree in 1966, both from the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. From 1966 to 1973 he was employed at the Institut für Nachrichtentechnik of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, where he was involved in studies of digital communication systems with emphasis on source encoding. There he received the Habilitation and became Associate Professor in 1970.

Since 1973 he is Full Professor and Head of the Institut für Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik und Informationsverarbeitung at the Universität Hannover, Germany. In 1988 he also became member of the board of directors of the Laboratorium für Informationstechnologie of the Universität Hannover.

His main research field is video and audio coding for future communication systems. He is author of more than 50 research papers and holder of 15 patents. He received the Award of the Nachrichtentechnische Gesellschaft 1971, the K.H. Beckurts Award 1991, the Science Award 1977 of Niedersachsen and the Küpfmüller Prize 2000. In 2008, he received the Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Richard-Theile Medaille. He was guest professor at the University of Hangzhou in China in 1981 and at the University of Pretoria in South Africa in 1984.

H. G. Musmann is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, of the Academia Europaea Cambridge, of the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europea, Wien and of the Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft. From 1988 to 1992 he chaired the ISO MPEG/Audio group which developed the ISO Audio Coding Standard MP3.