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Why Music Really Is Getting Louder
Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"
It's involves all audio devices in general, although it could have to do with unintentional design specifications.
More often than not, I find that I need to set the Windows master volume to an extremely low level - one or two pixels above silence. After that, I need to set the wave volume to that same region - near the bottom. Next, my speaker volume is set to low as well. After all this, I'm actually comfortable with the standard operating system sounds.
Unless there's some boost or gain that I haven't noticed, it's more than just the music industry that's having problems.
Sadly, you don't have to go back to the vinyl days for examlpes of this.
The "engineering to death" that you talk about is usually dynamic range compression, where you artificially limit the difference between the softest and the loudest sound reproduced in the media. Compression is very useful in certain situations (guitar compressors are fairly popular to "focus" the sound of the instrument, and compressing vocals is a common practice), but nowadays it has become popular to over-compress pretty much everything in modern music. The net result is that the music appears louder, since the volume variations are reduced, but what you get is tracks where it is impossible to discerne fine details - everything feels mashed together, in a way. This might be good for certain styles (hiphop, perhaps), but the practice is so extended that it has become impossible to find new music with proper production and mixing.
Adding insult to injury, it has also become very common to boost the audio levels (volumes) in the CDs so much that they "grow" outside the margins that the media offers, again, trying to make it sound louder and meaner. This is called clipping, and creates clearly audible, horrendous distortion. I've noticed this in a shitload of new tracks, and it boggles my mind that anyone might find ok to distribute audio in that state.
Nowadays i have a hard time finding music produced after mid 90s' that doesn't suffer one of these symptoms. Pop music, particularly, is horrid in this sence. The art of subtely crafting layers of sound seems to be lost... and i'm not saying that every band should sound like Pink Floyd, but, for Gods' sake, when you have all the instruments sounding constantly at the same level in a rock trio it just becomes annoying. Tool is one rock band i've discovered still cares about proper mixing, off the top of my head. On the other hand, i fell in love with the self-titled CD of Army of anyone... or their songs, atleast. It's a shame such a fine album can wear you out after a few listens because of poor mixing.
I have noticed that the older I get the louder I need music to be. Especially voice.
... Really who the Hell could actually stand "A Scanner Darkley" at normal speed?)
In fact I am 35 and I watch all DVDs with the subtitles. (Of course, part of that is that I watch a lot of DVDs at 1.2x to 2x speed, but
But back to my point, as I age I am less and less able to sift background noise from speech.
And we now live in an aging society.
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
You already have a built in upper limit, normalizing the range to that limit fixes the problem.
Normalize-audio is a package that does this. Here's what the Debian repository says:
The package also works on ogg vorbis and mp3. You can do it on ripping, or playback. Each song can be normalized individually or as a collection. The result is that you don't have to reach for the volume knob all day.
You are SOL if the record company has already applied dumb techniques to the CD before you get it. Peak "compressing", where all of the peaks are maxed out is a real distoriton of the original sound. When you add a heavy handed turn up that clips as well, you get Californication as mentioned. As the article also notes, it's difficult to digitize clipped audio. A clipped wave is like a square wave - it has all frequencies and takes lots of bandwith.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's tough being able to hear. Unlike many of my peers, I'm not going deaf, and so going to a bar is painful, since I haven't spent years ruining my hearing like they have. Yes I'm old, but their ears are older, and they wouldn't need it up so loud if they'd cared for their ears like I have done for mine.
I try to congratulate DJs that don't cross the pain threshold with their volume level. There are even some restaurants like Boston Pizza in some locations, that play their music loud enough to damage hearing after not a long exposure.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The pioneer of this kind of thing was Phil Spector. He was maybe the most famous/influential producer of all time. Among other things, he used to listen to the music he produced on a truly lousy audio system, the car radio. His music was tailored to sound good on a car radio. Given the number of albums he sold, you have to say he was right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spector
The connection between music, the environment, the ear and the mind is seriously studied and is reasonably well understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustic_model
In blind testing of audio equipment, it is critical to match volume levels within a fraction of a decibel. That is because people have a strong tendency to prefer a slightly louder source. In blind testing, listeners will describe the louder source as better in all sorts of subjective ways that have nothing to do with loudness: brighter, richer, warmer, etc. This happens with any kind music, from chamber music to stadium rock.
I think the article oversimplifies somewhat by casting this as a matter of taste for loud rock music, rather than a more subtle issue of psychoacoustics.
It's been going on for years - Oasis albums are basically unlistenable: horribly engineered, and they actually sound clipped. The newspapers wheeled out the example of Californication (Red Hot Chili Peppers) last week and they are right. Not quite as bad as Oasis, but half of the tracks are unlistenable. It ruins good songs like Californication itself.
I also find it really annoying to have the volume level OK, then suddenly everything is too loud and distorted when the next album comes on, because some asshat of a recording engineer pushed the levels up until the waveforms clipped.
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A word of warning regarding ear plugs: put them in a plastic bag or some other sort of container when you're not using them. I set a pair of plugs down on my piano, and the literally melted the lacquer underneath, right down to the wood.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Modern music is now a solid block of sound - the pictures really do tell the whole story..
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Graphs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:cd
The Black-Eyed-Peas CD I bought has 0.6 of a second of music entirely clipped out, and the average clip rate across the whole album is 54.4Hz?
The worst CDs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:sh
The Best CDs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:fa
Please bear in mind this is a limited selection of CDs, and CDs mastered in different countries can have very very different clip rates - even though they appear to be the identical CD.
I think it started with the Beatles and the fact that you couldn't even hear them in their concerts because of all the screaming fans.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I may have that recording. That's one of the few classical songs that I really would like to see more compressed. You turn the volume way up on the quiet parts because you're so used to flat music and then the goddamn cannon try to blast your eardrums out. It's a wonderful piece as long as you don't abuse the knob.
It's called "Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra - Erich Kunzel - [Tchaikovshy 1812 Overture - Telarc 1979 Digital Recording #01] 1812" in my playlist. Wikipedia confirms that Eric Kunzel was one of the first to actually use cannon as intended by the composer.
This doesn't directly relate to the topic but is useful information.
I learned recently in a class that at 90dB, it will take about 8 hours for a person's hearing to degrade; every increase of 5dB will cut that time in half, so 95dB will degrade after 4 hours, 100dB degrades the hearing after 2 hours, and so forth. And here is something to compare: average speech is 60dB, car horns 15 feet away are around 100dB, and watching fireworks is 120dB.
You can't seriously tell me you've never seen people do this. Hell, anything you hear a booming and rattling car car audio system, what I've described is exactly what's going on. Don't try to use Fletcher and Munson to defend what those people are doing as anything other than an a musical atrocity.
Finally you get to the heart of the matter.
Get Audacity. Import a few tracks off of modern CDs. Look at the squared off waveforms. Then take a CD from, say, the late 1980s or early 1990s and look at the waveforms on that. Note the less clipped waveforms? Then take a listen. You will be amazed.
Oversaturating analog tape is fine because the clipping is more organic and less buzzy. In fact, you get a bit more presence from "recording hot." Oversaturating digital recording media? You get ugly digital clipping, artifacts, and buzz galore. Yet numb-nuts producers insist on "recording hot" when recording to digital. Result? Crappy recordings.
I am always struck by how wildly better the state of recording in the '70s was to what it is now. This is part of the reason. Don't get me started about Autotune.
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Actually, no. I'm a big fan of the way loud noises feel, but not a fan of the way they destroy my hearing. And at a live concert, of course, there's a lot of crowd noise to compete with. I think big speakers + ear plugs is a good combo (they sure turn your Mechwarrior games into a visceral experience).