Mr Robert Taylor

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20151 grants / $3,277

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Loud and Dynamic: Establishing a Framework for Aesthetically Evaluating Compression in Audio Mastering for Contemporary Music 2014 -

Background

 ‘Loudness’ has been a fundamental issue in audio production since it’s commercialisation in the mid 20^th Century. Thiele (2005) described 1957 as the year that Western popular music “changed forever” with the introduction of jukeboxes, “installed in large quantities in public places” (2005, p. 1). These “brightly lit monsters” (Ibid) were a catalyst for the pursuit of ‘loudness’ on vinyl recordings. Since the playback level was fixed and the customer had no control over volume, record companies were presented with the problem of getting their track to stand out from the others, ‘loudness’ became the preferred method (Weymouth, 2012). Thiele goes on to conclude that competing for program loudness “survived the age of the jukeboxes and permanently changed the culture of much popular music” (2005, p. 1). 

So what exactly is ‘loudness’ if not the ability to turn a volume knob clockwise and play the music ‘louder’? Here we define ‘loudness’ as something we perceive, something that is a fundamental feature of our hearing mechanism and subsequent cognitive awareness as the difference between loud and soft. Levitin (2009) describes “our perceptual system” as “exquisitely tuned to detect changes in the environment, because change can be a signal that danger is imminent” (2009, p. 185), implying that audio perception and perceived loudness has evolutionary origins; 

            “Sounds typically trigger the greatest startle reactions. A sudden noise causes us to jump out of our seats, to turn our heads, to duck, or to cover our ears. The auditory startle is the fastest and arguably the most important of our startle responses” (Ibid). 

The human auditory system transforms fluctuations of air pressure into sensations we experience as sound (Schmidt et al, 1996). We interpret the acoustic intensity as loudness, a sensation of loud or soft corresponding to the magnitude of sound pressure level (Simpson, 2010). As Levitin argues, loudness “does not exist in the world, it exists in the mind” (2006, p. 69); a sensation to which each different person’s “impression of sound intensity is unique” (Zemack, 2007, p. 1). Therefore, the correct terminology concerning loudness is perceived loudness, although this is rarely used in literature outside of the study of psychoacoustics. When the term loudness is used to describe a music recording, it refers to the magnitude of the recorded signal imprinted on a media that will eventually correspond to a particular perceived loudness for the listener when reproduced through an audio playback system. 

If we keep the volume knob of an audio system constant and playback a series of musical recordings stored on compact disc we will most likely find that the perceived loudness we experience differs from recording to recording. Some recordings will be perceived as either softer or louder than others. It all comes down to the act of comparison, which inevitably comes with the territory of music selection, which as this paper will demonstrate is responsive to a number of contextual factors pertaining to the cultural contexts of production and reception. When we listen to music from various sources we compare not only the musical content before us, but a range of factors including listening environment, known musical habitus, the mythology of the artist, the virtuosity of the musical performance, the listeners emotional attachment and importantly, the perceived loudness of the music. Research into psychoacoustics has shown that we gravitate towards a preference for music that is perceived louder than others because of inherent structures in the human hearing system. Hence the ‘louder is better’ paradigm.

At the core of cognitive responses that are claimed to be responsible for this pursuit of loudness in music production is the premise of a predilection for louder over softer sounds. The commercial music industry is therefore responsible for large increases in the relative level of sound recordings, arguably predicated upon the established assumption that a ‘louder’ recording will invariably, by comparison, be preferable to most listeners (Vickers, 2010; Weymouth, 2012). The music industry clearly assumes that this will translate into more sales. Like advertisers on radio and television, these considerations have led artists and music companies to actively seek increases in recording levels, such that their product was perceived as relatively ‘louder’ than their competitors.   

To create a ‘loud’ music recording that will be perceived by the listener as being louder by comparison to another recording, it actually has to be a larger magnitude signal to begin with on the selected media. This requires increasing the overall level of the signal to the maximum that the media will accommodate before undesirable artefacts appear such as distortion. There is however a method to increase the perceived loudness even further than the physical limitations of the media by enacting another concept of psychoacoustics; the human hearing system recognizes perceived loudness as an average of levels over time and not very short loud sounds such as a gunshot for example. By reducing these short ‘peaks’ in the music, the average signal level can be increased yet again till it reaches the upper limit of the media, therefore increasing the perceived loudness. A common audio process known as Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) or simply ‘compression’ is implemented in which the dynamic range of the music, the difference between the loud and soft sections of the music, is reduced and the average level increased. Hyper-compression is a term commonly used to depict an extreme variant of the process that drastically reduces the dynamic range, which in turn increases the perceived loudness. The more these peaks are reduced the more the average level of the music can be increased.

The account of loudness in music recordings dates back to the 1950s as mention earlier with the introduction of jukeboxes. We can explore two separate loudness revolutions that correspond to the available technology at the time; one embodied in the analog era, and then the next supercharged digital era that took loudness to a whole new paradigm. As interesting as it may be to discuss how the Beatles and other notable bands of the analog 60s, 70s and 80s all struggled with the limitations of vinyl media for loudness, the 1990s so called ‘loudness wars’ was far more prevalent and pervasive. The introduction of digital technology armed audio practitioners with lethal ability to increase the level of audio masters, negating all complications associated with the previous analog media. Mastering engineers were now “not constrained by the limitation of the sound storage medium anymore” (von Ruschkowski, 2009, P. 222) as there were “hardly any technical limitations for the CD” (Ibid). Coupled with new digital forms of dynamic range compression this technology created what has been described as a competition to be the ‘loudest’. The use of hyper-compression in the mastering process was dubbed by both media and industry as the so-called ‘loudness wars’. This somewhat scientifically imprecise and colloquial title for the hyper-compression of recordings that suggests a ‘winner’, was afforded more clarity by Weymouth as “a theoretical two-player strategic game in which the two players may not cooperate, even if it seems to be in their best interest” (2012, p. 3), akin to a cold war. Vickers was more blunt in his description of the standoff as “a zero sum mindset of ‘beating the other guy’” (2010, p. 17).

A definitive explanation as to why hyper-compression is so pervasive in music production is not clear. One of course should take into account the complex creative and cultural context of music production and musical genre, and also the effect the diffusion of digital technology innovation has had on the way music is produced and subsequently reproduced. There is however still the underlying argument that artists have to maintain a certain degree of loudness to maintain competitiveness in the industry and this is prevalent in the literature on the subject; once one artist had reached a new level of loudness, all others had to follow so when comparisons where made between recordings, one was not seen as softer and somehow, inferior (Weymouth, 2012). 

This paper, in refusing the polarities of audiophillia versus commercial imperatives of loudness, will argue for a contextually nuanced approach to the appropriate use or abstinence of loudness as an artistic choice. Today, with some vantage over the relative value of arguments for or against hyper-compression, artists can potentially seek to make an aesthetically informed as opposed to assuming an ideologically formed decision about where, when and how to use this powerful but easily abused technology. Moving beyond arguments that are grounded in science we must therefore introduce the realm of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgment is of course inherently subjective for it brings together what we might more broadly understand as objective reasons and subjective desires. Aesthetic judgment is a subjective union of sensory, emotional and intellectual responses to art, culture and nature. Consequently, using scientifically measurable assessments of sense perception as the only criterion for forming an aesthetic judgment is clearly problematic. Instead, and depending on our level of expertise, the listener might look to how the work functions to convey meaning. We also invariable consider the social and cultural contexts for the works production and reception. So, although taste is subjective there are still various characteristics that can be considered as part of the process of evaluating a creative work’s success in conveying meaning, message and aesthetic experience. In informing an aesthetic judgment, we bring together a subjectively driven aggregate of analysis, interpretation and feeling. Somehow, bearing all of this in mind we then pass our judgment on the work’s perceived value, relevance, timeliness, the extent to which it absorbs its influences and the way in which it generates meaning. In short, is loudness better? Well the answer would appear to be sometimes.

In building our discussion we will draw upon a recently completed and therefore unknown musical recording by ‘The Ghosts of Nothing’, titled “In Memory of Johnny B Goode” (2014), which we have brought into a focus group environment with a view to teasing out some of the threads underpinning this complex universe of considerations. In fact the genesis of this paper was formed in earlier discussion between the authors about how to best approach the mastering of this concept album. It seemed a logical choice to which to tease out our agnostic predisposition to mastering for it oscillates between louder rock driven, detailed electronic and subtle ambient textures. It is also worth noting that the authors both share a background in commercial music production in the 1990s, at the height of the loudness wars yet have also long been enthusiasts of dynamic and granular detail in obscure electronic music. By way of disclosure, the authors must therefore declare that they both bring an emotional investment in both blisteringly loud rock music and the value of dynamic range offered by in much cutting edge electronic music. It is for this reason we thought it would be prudent to bring a diversity of voices to the discussion. This focus group consisted of a classically trained musician who also likes going to dance parties, a technical officer in media production, a scholar in communication and media and an untrained popular music enthusiast. This paper is organized is accordance with the main threads of discussion emanating from this focus group. It is from these threads that we build further discussion and analysis. 

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Mr Robert Taylor