Category: Editorial
Today's (Pop) music is all noise. And it's draning. That's not to say it's not good - it's just loud.
Robert Levine from the Rolling Stone mourns over the age of the MP3, where tiny nuance and splendor gives way to the equivalent of aural McDonalds: music that is overproduced, undifferentiated, and in the end, really not good for you.
I’m no production expert, but I do know that sound dynamics (traditionally, variations in volume) are good. It’s the quiet moments that evoke sentiment. It’s the heavy sections that make you rise to your feet. Change makes things interesting. Unique features are what makes things endearing, and what brings us back to them.
In today’s music, the only sound dynamics we have are “blaring” and “ear-bleeding”:
“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."
Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, described the details she found from her son’s original three-quarter-inch tape:
"We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."
Can we go back to what we knew before? Fashion is cyclical. How about the way we like to perceive music? I hate to say it, but I doubt it.
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