Loudness wars : the end of good music? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

itch vaccine · 01-25-2007, 05:30 PM

Hi there,

Been MIA from this forum for a long long time, been spending most of my time looking at stuff on head-fi.org, staring blankly at headphones, looking at amps and all that jazz.

Well here I am now.

Loudness Wars.

Well, sound engineers are pumping up the volume in most musical tracks and reducing the dynamics of the songs that are played. There are a lot of cut offs when you look at the waveforms. There is absolutely no reason for the song to be louder because we can always turn the volume up to our own listening volume according to our preferences.

Sadly this is not the case because we live in an era where louder is better. Nothing can be done.

There is no more Miles Davis or Pink Floyd quality recordings, all has gone down the drain. Older albums are better. So is the case for Radiohead at least, with The Bends "sounding" better on Fake Plastic Trees than Paranoid Andriod on OK Computer.

Links for you to see : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/

vanblah · 01-26-2007, 08:54 PM

When we had our album mastered we requested that it NOT be "brick walled". Brad Blackwood did the mastering and he is one of the more vocal anti-loudness war people anyway.

I hate looking at a songs waveform and see nothing but plateaus. But then again, it doesn't really matter when you're talking about "wall-of-guitar" rock that is popular right now. Digital clipping is only barely audible when you have 47 distorted guitar tracks.

Music needs to breathe or else it ceases to be music.

Willravel · 01-26-2007, 11:32 PM

I've got stacks of Miles. I think you might be looking in the wrong place for your music. You see, there are two kinds of music: noise and emotion. You're talking about noise, which has, for the past 50+ years, been dominating what is called "pop". It's been this way for a while, and it shows no signs of stopping so long as people can profit from it. And it's fun sometimes. I've been to a few really nice clubs where they play techno which is the ultimate expression of noise. It's not necessarily all bad, as some composers can spin some amazing melodies into their songs, but the songs aren't there to stir emotion, they are there to make noise.

If you want emotion, I suggest you go get a really good recording of Dvorak's 9th "From the New World" or Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album. Enjoy them alone or quietly with friends. Listen to the amazing emotions and let them overwhelm you. It's not noise.

Manic_Skafe · 01-27-2007, 12:48 AM

Ultimately, this thread is worthless. We can break down and spout off the qualities and attributes that constitute good music or good production but in the end we'd be doing nothing more than expelling our personal opinions as if they actually retain any particular value beyond our own on perspectives.

I don't pay attention to recording techniques and I usually don't critically analyze what makes any album I've ever heard good or bad - I simply know that I've got some version of the archetypal good band or dj or artist in my mind and as close to that illusion any particular work of musical art can get is typically how good or bad I consider them to be.

I've come to the realization that it's all a matter of personal taste and familiarity and that there's an incredible depth in all sorts of noisy and jarring musical genres and experiences - it just takes a bit more effort. And while some would say that Timberlake's "Sexy Back" isn't nearly as good as any tune Beethoven could whistle - that opinion does very little to negate the fact that there's an incredible experience to be had when enjoying both ends of the spectrum.

I've reached this conclusion with the aid of:

Infidel?/Castro! - Bioentropic Damage Fractal
Ulver - Blood Inside
The End - Transfer Trachea Reverberation Reverberations from Point: False Omniscent / Witin Dividia
Knut - Challenger / Bastardizer / Terraformer
Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue
Behold...The Arctopus - Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning
Aesop Rock - Labor Days / Bazooka Tooth
Cephalic Carnage - Every Album
Paul Okenfold - too many live mixes
...

roachboy · 01-27-2007, 09:57 AM

ok so first off i dont understand the noise/emotion distinction at all, will.

in the end, this is little more than a question of personal taste--i know this--but i find that sound/music involving sheets of radio static (for example) can also be very emotionally involving--just as i have found more music than i can remember that is quiet and sparse that makes me reach for my revolver. in a sense....what allows music to breath is not necessarily a matter of volume on its own: pitch selection and placement are basic...and players who have reached the level where they understand that what you do not play is as important as what you do play (miles says this in his autobiography--others have as well, but i always associate it with miles. and i like his early 70s electric stuff more than i like the quintet music from the late 50s, including kind of blue (sorta)--so miles was quite flexible in terms of the contexts within which he would deploy this understanding of playing. younger players tend not to get this thing about silence, about not playing everything.)

the engineering question raised in the op seems more about the dominance of a particular style of mixing/mastering than about that style itself.
there are many problems that run along with this:

who decided that a "natural" instrument sound requires that the micing position the listener inside the instrument to the complete exlcusion of the space within which the instrument is being played? when did this become standard?

if you listen to the classic blue note recordings of the early 60s, they are about rudy van gelder's living room as much as they are about what was being played in van gelder's living room. the sense of depth/space in these sound images is generated by microphone placement and a decision not to defeat the characteristics of the acoustic space within which they are placed.

and an instrument is played in a space: the sound deploys in a space: it is not some abstract phenomenon that is always the same regardless of where it is played. sound is about the space within which it sounds as much as it is about itself.

if you decide to close mic everything, you cant create a comparable sense of space by turning up the results. trying to do this indicates that the engineer has a limited notion of "presence" and is imposing this notion of the sounds he manipulates. you get a kind of shabby, predictable two-channel image. (you could run the same criticism through conventional notions of where the interesting elements are in a pitch--most recordings seem to operate as if the interesting stuff is in the attack--i think everything of interest is in th e decay patterns, but that may be the sort of thing a pianist would say)

maybe it is as a reaction against this kind of mixing that i have been kinda obsessed with very old recordings that are transferred to digital without the usual "cleaning up" of the sound: recordings that (intentionally or not) use surface noise as compositional elements (any repeatable feature of a recording is a compositional element--cage was right about repeatability, but he didnt really understand recordings): sound that is less present--rather the inverse in that the sound seems quite far away and is received distorted--and the distortions are a significant element of the experience of listening itself.

i also dont understand the appeal of standard piano tunings, straight chord voicings nor of mechanical 4/4. all this may explain why the music i am involved with has no danger of ever becoming popular. but if that is the case, then it follows that there is no reason to use an engineer whose aesthetic doesnt interest me. and there is no reason to use this type of sound. so we dont.

Willravel · 01-27-2007, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ok so first off i dont understand the noise/emotion distinction at all, will.

My quirky sense of humor, I'm afraid. I've had the "old music is good, new music is bad" conversation so many times, I've created the response they want. The truth is music is like anything else, you're going to like some of it and you're not going to like some of it. If you don't like beets, then you don't eat beets. If you don't like Justin Timberlake, then don't listen to him.

roachboy · 01-27-2007, 10:46 AM

will: i wondered about that (whether you were joking) but decided to twist it around on you, mostly because i was not interested in the old=good new=bad elements of the op. there are other ways of thinking about what is outlined. and there are some very strange conventions behind it.

besides, i prefer pink floyd from before dark side of the moon, which i never really liked. there was much more interesting stuff going on when they were recording on more primitive gear. dark side is too clean, too processed, and---to my mind----is just a dull record. i dont like atom heart mother either, which i think is the prelude to dark side. but the other stuff: piper at the gates of dawn, saucerful of secrets, ummagumma, meddle (side 2) and the suondtracks--all are cool, even after all this time. in my tiny world anyway.

Derwood · 01-29-2007, 07:13 AM

I see a bit of this in live music. Since taking a job as Lighting Director at a live performance venue (see sig) I get to see how a lot of bands are amplified. All electric bands have to be close-miced in order for the sound mixer to mix the PA properly. Acoustic instruments, however, have several options.

In the span of one week, we had 2 different bluegrass bands play. One had entirely acoustic instruments and three stand microphones, so to be heard, they had to play near the mic, leaning closer for solo's, etc. The other band had all their acoustic instruments "DI'ed" (direct input), meaning they had internal pickups or microphones and then plugged directly into the sound mix. I vastly preferred the former to the latter.

vanblah · 01-31-2007, 10:23 AM

This all started when CDs became the medium of choice over LPs. LPs HAD to be mastered differently because a loud bass note or even a loud plosive would cause the needle to skip.

CD's allow mastering engineers to create louder masters. As they discovered that, the producers (the guys running the show) started telling the mastering engineers to "make it louder". At some point the peaks (the loud parts) started clipping, so they started using compression to keep the peaks from clipping. This started making the valleys (the quiet parts) louder. Thus, the difference between peak and valley is diminished; therefore, the music is not as dynamic.

The recording process itself hasn't changed much. The mastering techniques have.

There is a time and place for wall-of-guitar and noise. It's just as essential to musical emotion as a single violin or flute playing a quiet phrase in a classical piece. The "loudness wars" have nothing to do with music being good or bad.

There is a lot of good music--music that is played well, written well, and recorded well--that has been destroyed by a mastering process which has reduced the dynamics to nothing but loud.

01-25-2007, 05:30 PM	#1 (permalink)
itch vaccine Psycho Location: on my spinning computer chair	Loudness wars : the end of good music? Hi there, Been MIA from this forum for a long long time, been spending most of my time looking at stuff on head-fi.org, staring blankly at headphones, looking at amps and all that jazz. Well here I am now. Loudness Wars. Well, sound engineers are pumping up the volume in most musical tracks and reducing the dynamics of the songs that are played. There are a lot of cut offs when you look at the waveforms. There is absolutely no reason for the song to be louder because we can always turn the volume up to our own listening volume according to our preferences. Sadly this is not the case because we live in an era where louder is better. Nothing can be done. There is no more Miles Davis or Pink Floyd quality recordings, all has gone down the drain. Older albums are better. So is the case for Radiohead at least, with The Bends "sounding" better on Fake Plastic Trees than Paranoid Andriod on OK Computer. Links for you to see : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/ __________________ "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein

01-27-2007, 12:48 AM	#4 (permalink)
Manic_Skafe More Than You Expect Location: Queens	Ultimately, this thread is worthless. We can break down and spout off the qualities and attributes that constitute good music or good production but in the end we'd be doing nothing more than expelling our personal opinions as if they actually retain any particular value beyond our own on perspectives. I don't pay attention to recording techniques and I usually don't critically analyze what makes any album I've ever heard good or bad - I simply know that I've got some version of the archetypal good band or dj or artist in my mind and as close to that illusion any particular work of musical art can get is typically how good or bad I consider them to be. I've come to the realization that it's all a matter of personal taste and familiarity and that there's an incredible depth in all sorts of noisy and jarring musical genres and experiences - it just takes a bit more effort. And while some would say that Timberlake's "Sexy Back" isn't nearly as good as any tune Beethoven could whistle - that opinion does very little to negate the fact that there's an incredible experience to be had when enjoying both ends of the spectrum. I've reached this conclusion with the aid of: Infidel?/Castro! - Bioentropic Damage Fractal Ulver - Blood Inside The End - Transfer Trachea Reverberation Reverberations from Point: False Omniscent / Witin Dividia Knut - Challenger / Bastardizer / Terraformer Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue Behold...The Arctopus - Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning Aesop Rock - Labor Days / Bazooka Tooth Cephalic Carnage - Every Album Paul Okenfold - too many live mixes ... __________________ "Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

01-27-2007, 09:57 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	ok so first off i dont understand the noise/emotion distinction at all, will. in the end, this is little more than a question of personal taste--i know this--but i find that sound/music involving sheets of radio static (for example) can also be very emotionally involving--just as i have found more music than i can remember that is quiet and sparse that makes me reach for my revolver. in a sense....what allows music to breath is not necessarily a matter of volume on its own: pitch selection and placement are basic...and players who have reached the level where they understand that what you do not play is as important as what you do play (miles says this in his autobiography--others have as well, but i always associate it with miles. and i like his early 70s electric stuff more than i like the quintet music from the late 50s, including kind of blue (sorta)--so miles was quite flexible in terms of the contexts within which he would deploy this understanding of playing. younger players tend not to get this thing about silence, about not playing everything.) the engineering question raised in the op seems more about the dominance of a particular style of mixing/mastering than about that style itself. there are many problems that run along with this: who decided that a "natural" instrument sound requires that the micing position the listener inside the instrument to the complete exlcusion of the space within which the instrument is being played? when did this become standard? if you listen to the classic blue note recordings of the early 60s, they are about rudy van gelder's living room as much as they are about what was being played in van gelder's living room. the sense of depth/space in these sound images is generated by microphone placement and a decision not to defeat the characteristics of the acoustic space within which they are placed. and an instrument is played in a space: the sound deploys in a space: it is not some abstract phenomenon that is always the same regardless of where it is played. sound is about the space within which it sounds as much as it is about itself. if you decide to close mic everything, you cant create a comparable sense of space by turning up the results. trying to do this indicates that the engineer has a limited notion of "presence" and is imposing this notion of the sounds he manipulates. you get a kind of shabby, predictable two-channel image. (you could run the same criticism through conventional notions of where the interesting elements are in a pitch--most recordings seem to operate as if the interesting stuff is in the attack--i think everything of interest is in th e decay patterns, but that may be the sort of thing a pianist would say) maybe it is as a reaction against this kind of mixing that i have been kinda obsessed with very old recordings that are transferred to digital without the usual "cleaning up" of the sound: recordings that (intentionally or not) use surface noise as compositional elements (any repeatable feature of a recording is a compositional element--cage was right about repeatability, but he didnt really understand recordings): sound that is less present--rather the inverse in that the sound seems quite far away and is received distorted--and the distortions are a significant element of the experience of listening itself. i also dont understand the appeal of standard piano tunings, straight chord voicings nor of mechanical 4/4. all this may explain why the music i am involved with has no danger of ever becoming popular. but if that is the case, then it follows that there is no reason to use an engineer whose aesthetic doesnt interest me. and there is no reason to use this type of sound. so we dont. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 01-27-2007 at 09:59 AM..

01-27-2007, 10:46 AM	#7 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	will: i wondered about that (whether you were joking) but decided to twist it around on you, mostly because i was not interested in the old=good new=bad elements of the op. there are other ways of thinking about what is outlined. and there are some very strange conventions behind it. besides, i prefer pink floyd from before dark side of the moon, which i never really liked. there was much more interesting stuff going on when they were recording on more primitive gear. dark side is too clean, too processed, and---to my mind----is just a dull record. i dont like atom heart mother either, which i think is the prelude to dark side. but the other stuff: piper at the gates of dawn, saucerful of secrets, ummagumma, meddle (side 2) and the suondtracks--all are cool, even after all this time. in my tiny world anyway. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

01-29-2007, 07:13 AM	#8 (permalink)
Derwood Who You Crappin? Location: Everywhere and Nowhere	I see a bit of this in live music. Since taking a job as Lighting Director at a live performance venue (see sig) I get to see how a lot of bands are amplified. All electric bands have to be close-miced in order for the sound mixer to mix the PA properly. Acoustic instruments, however, have several options. In the span of one week, we had 2 different bluegrass bands play. One had entirely acoustic instruments and three stand microphones, so to be heard, they had to play near the mic, leaning closer for solo's, etc. The other band had all their acoustic instruments "DI'ed" (direct input), meaning they had internal pickups or microphones and then plugged directly into the sound mix. I vastly preferred the former to the latter. __________________ "You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

01-26-2007, 08:54 PM	#2 (permalink)
vanblah Junkie	When we had our album mastered we requested that it NOT be "brick walled". Brad Blackwood did the mastering and he is one of the more vocal anti-loudness war people anyway. I hate looking at a songs waveform and see nothing but plateaus. But then again, it doesn't really matter when you're talking about "wall-of-guitar" rock that is popular right now. Digital clipping is only barely audible when you have 47 distorted guitar tracks. Music needs to breathe or else it ceases to be music.

01-26-2007, 11:32 PM	#3 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I've got stacks of Miles. I think you might be looking in the wrong place for your music. You see, there are two kinds of music: noise and emotion. You're talking about noise, which has, for the past 50+ years, been dominating what is called "pop". It's been this way for a while, and it shows no signs of stopping so long as people can profit from it. And it's fun sometimes. I've been to a few really nice clubs where they play techno which is the ultimate expression of noise. It's not necessarily all bad, as some composers can spin some amazing melodies into their songs, but the songs aren't there to stir emotion, they are there to make noise. If you want emotion, I suggest you go get a really good recording of Dvorak's 9th "From the New World" or Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album. Enjoy them alone or quietly with friends. Listen to the amazing emotions and let them overwhelm you. It's not noise.

01-31-2007, 10:23 AM	#9 (permalink)
vanblah Junkie	This all started when CDs became the medium of choice over LPs. LPs HAD to be mastered differently because a loud bass note or even a loud plosive would cause the needle to skip. CD's allow mastering engineers to create louder masters. As they discovered that, the producers (the guys running the show) started telling the mastering engineers to "make it louder". At some point the peaks (the loud parts) started clipping, so they started using compression to keep the peaks from clipping. This started making the valleys (the quiet parts) louder. Thus, the difference between peak and valley is diminished; therefore, the music is not as dynamic. The recording process itself hasn't changed much. The mastering techniques have. There is a time and place for wall-of-guitar and noise. It's just as essential to musical emotion as a single violin or flute playing a quiet phrase in a classical piece. The "loudness wars" have nothing to do with music being good or bad. There is a lot of good music--music that is played well, written well, and recorded well--that has been destroyed by a mastering process which has reduced the dynamics to nothing but loud.