The Impoverishment of Music.
Over at Stylus Magazine, Nick Southall wrote a wonderful essay about how all music is turning into background music because of sound engineering.
[M]odern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. But when is it desirable for music to be at a consistent volume? When it’s not being actively listened to; i.e. when it’s intended as background music.
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On most modern CDs the music is squashed into the top 5 dB of a medium that has over 90 dB of range. […] Play “Hey Ladies” from Paul’s Boutique again, a song that’s almost 20 years old, and feel just how head-snappingly phantasmagorical it is when the soundstage suddenly flips into widescreen during the intro. Is there anything remotely approaching that on the headachingly dense and loud St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley?
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[Music is] meant to be dynamic, to move, to fall and rise and to take you with it, physically and emotionally. […] Compressed CDs grab your attention in the same way that people who shout grab your attention, and they’re just as tiring and annoying in the long run [… S]ome mastering engineers claim that a huge amount of professionally released CDs since the turn of the decade (and earlier) have been so compressed that they don’t even consider them to be “musical.”
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Music is about tension and release. With very “hot,” un-dynamic music there is no release because the sensory assault simply doesn’t let-up. By the time you’ve listened closely (or tried to) to a whole album that’s heavily compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange - battered, fatigued by, and disgusted with the music you love.
Not that he’s categorically against compression:
The recent and escalating problems with compression are “user errors”; people falling victim to negative instincts and misguided commercial desires, a kind of penis envy transposed to volume, and sabotaging their own records in the process.
Although in commenting on the article elsewhere, Bret recounts an anecdote that shows it isn’t exactly a new phenomenon:
Unlike CDs, vinyl doesn’t really have a “clipping point” past which the sound quality degrades. Instead, a loud recording is a technical risk - it increases the chances of the needle slipping over into the adjacent groove. At NAMM one year, I heard an old pro recalling a conversation he had with (IIRC) the engineer for one of the Beatles albums, way back when. He was complaining, “You cut that disc so hot, it skipped on 25% of the customer’s sets!” The engineer replied, “Yeah, it skipped all the way to the top of the charts!” Loudness wars, even then.
Going into the question of why people (the “consumer”) would actually want this sort of thing, Nick talks about the pace of modern life:
It strikes me that the way many people are listening to music these days - on trains, in offices, on the street - is not a normal listening experience. It is neither conscious engagement nor ambient enhancement. It’s a hermetic seal, a blockade to the outside world. It’s the opposite of ambient music, in that it doesn’t become a part of or complement the environment it is played in, but rather destroys it. […] People are forgetting how to listen, and who can blame them? Music is ubiquitous - it pervades every shop, every café, every workplace, every restaurant, every television programme, and every film.
But I’ve committed the sin of trying to compress a sprawling, detailed article into a few tasty soundbites. Stop over there, and listen read.
There’s also a follow-on article that consists of notes, responses to points people have made about the essay, some listening recommendations, and things like that - much briefer and more compact than the essay itself, so don’t miss it.