Casualties of the Loudness Wars

(Photo found here.)

There's a recent post up at the Britannica Blog called "1948 and the Birth of Rock and Roll Music". It focuses various technological innovations from that year as well as one great social change.

To begin with, author Gregory McNamee notes that the Second Great Migration was underway which meant and people with background in different musical styles were coming together and sharing. This spawned new musical styles, including rock'n'roll.

On the technological front, 1948 was the year Leo Fender started selling his Broadcaster, the first mass-produced electric guitar. This was the same year that the LP (long-playing record) was invented and would begin to supplant the 78. The final innovation that McNamee mentions is the transistor which gave us portable radios.

About a month prior to McNamee's post the relationship between technology and rock music was examined by Robert Levine in an article at Rolling Stone which described the Loudness Wars.

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds.

Although I was aware that albums were getting louder with each passing year, that they had started sounding like shit really hit home a bit over five years ago when I listened to Rush's then-new album Vapor Trails. The opening track, "One Little Victory", came blaring at me from the get-go and never stopped. I eventually discovered an article called "Over the Limit" at a site aimed at recording professionals. The author, Rip Rowan, is a huge Rush fan (and a drummer to boot) and he analyzed various Rush albums and shows how Vapor Trails was a casualty of the Loudness War. It's a very interesting article as it gives a bit of the history of peak limiting (the technique used to make CDs louder) and graphs showing just how loud Vapor Trails is. Rowan writes:

WHY IS THE LOUDER IS BETTER APPROACH THE WRONG APPROACH? BECAUSE WHEN ALL OF THE SIGNAL IS AT THE MAXIMUM LEVEL, THEN THERE IS NO WAY FOR THE SIGNAL TO HAVE ANY PUNCH. THE WHOLE THING COMES SCREAMING AT YOU LIKE A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. AS WE ALL KNOW, WHEN YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS THERE ARE NO CUES TO HELP THE BRAIN MAKE SENSE OF THE SIGNAL, AND THE MIND TIRES QUICKLY OF TRYING TO PROCESS WHAT IS, BASICALLY, WHITE NOISE. LIKEWISE, A SIGNAL THAT JUST PEGS THE METERS CAUSES THE BRAIN TO REACT AS THOUGH IT IS BEING FED WHITE NOISE. WE SIMPLY FILTER IT OUT AND QUIT TRYING TO PROCESS IT.

Here's a video demonstrating what's happening.

So why all the loudness? Going back to the Rolling Stone article:

"In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention."

Just as CDs supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more convenience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

So, as people fill up their iPods to listen to MP3s that don't sound very good on ear buds that that have comparably limited sound reproduction capabilities, folks who take quality over quantity suffer because lots of CDs today are peak limited to hell and sound like shit.

Tangentially, the RS article also mentions the "artificial perfection" of much of today's music:

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

Stumbling on this article was fortuitous timing as this past weekend I watched the movie Before the Music Dies which examined the current state of the music industry. In one sequence, an audio engineer demonstrates how Auto-Tune works.

When I was making this year's first podcast which was a Genesis show from 1982, my mind traveled back to that year. I was just getting into the band and would listen to Abacab constantly. But there were no iPods back in 1982 nor MP3s. Instead I would get home from school, and put the album on a nice stereo system. But, perhaps more importantly, I sat there and listened to the music. No multitasking. The music received my undivided attention. I felt bad because I haven't done that in ages. To be sure, I've given an album my attention recently but I haven't done that and listened to it on an actual stereo as opposed to headphones or computer speakers. And so I've resolved to try and devote time this year to sitting down with an album in front of my stereo system and just listening without distracting myself.

How do you listen to music? Portable device? Computer? Stereo? Do you care if CDs have no dynamics? Do you ever take the time to simply listen to music instead of using it as background noise for other activities?