Recorded music doesn’t sound as good as it used to. Recordings sound muddy, clipped and lack punch. This is due to the ‘loudness war’ that has been taking place in recording studios. To make a track stand out from the rest of the pack, recording engineers have been turning up the volume on recorded music. Louder tracks grab the listener’s attention, and in this crowded music market, attention is important. And thus the loudness war – engineers must turn up the volume on their tracks lest the track sound wimpy when compared to all of the other loud tracks. However, there’s a downside to all this volume. Our music is compressed. The louds are louds and the softs are loud, with little difference. The result is that our music seems strained, there is little emotional range, and listening to loud all the time becomes tedious and tiring.
I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music.
First, lets start with a loudness plot of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. There’s a loudness range of -33 to about -15 dBs – a range of about 18 dBs.
Dave Brubeck - Take Five
Now take a look at a track from the new Metallica album. Here we see a dB range of from about -3 dB to about -6 dB – for a range of about 3 dB. The difference is rather striking. You can see the lack of dynamic range in the plot quite easily.
Metallica - Cyanide
Now you can’t really compare Dave Brubeck’s cool jazz with Metallica’s heavy metal – they are two very different kinds of music – so lets look at some others. (One caveat for all of these experiments – I don’t always know the provenance of all of my mp3s – some may be from remasters where the audio engineers may have adjusted the loudness, while some may be the original mix).
Here’s the venerable Stairway to Heaven – with a dB range of -40 dB to about -5dB for a range of 35 dB. That’s a whole lot of range.
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
Compare that to the track ’supermassive black hole’ – by Muse – with a range of just 4dB. I like Muse, but I find their tracks to get boring quickly – perhaps this is because of the lack of dynamic range robs some of the emotional impact. There’s no emotional arc like you can see in a song like Stairway to Heaven.
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Some more examples – The Clash – London Calling. Not a wide dynamic range – but still not at ear splitting volumes.
Clash - London Calling
This track by Nickleback is pushing the loudness envelope, but does have a bit of dynamic range.
Nickleback - Never Again
Compare the loudness level to the Sex Pistols. Less volume, and less dynamic range – but that’s how punk is – all one volume.
Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the U.K.
The Stooges – Raw Power is considered to be one of the loudest albums of all time. Indeed, the loudness curve is bursting through the margins of the plot.
The Stooges - Raw Power
Here in one plot are 4 tracks overlayed – Red is Dave Brubeck, Blue is the Sex Pistols, Green is Nickleback and purple is the Stooges.
Combined plot
There been quite a bit of writing about the loudness war. The wikipedia entry is quite comprehensive, with some excellent plots showing how some recordings have had a loudness makeover when remastered. The Rolling Stone’s article: The Death of High Fidelity gives reactions of musicians and record producers to the loudness war. Producer Butch Vig says “Compression is a necessary evil. The artists I know want to sound competitive. You don’t want your track to sound quieter or wimpier by comparison. We’ve raised the bar and you can’t really step back.”
The loudest artists
I have analyzed the loudness of about 15K tracks from the top 1,000 or so most popular artists. The average loudness across all 15K tracks is about -9.5 dB. The very loudest artists from this set – those with a loudness of -5 dB or greater are:
| Artist | dB |
|---|---|
| Venetian Snares | -1.25 |
| Soulja Boy | -2.38 |
| Slipknot | -2.65 |
| Dimmu Borgir | -2.73 |
| Andrew W.K. | -3.15 |
| Queens of the Stone Age | -3.23 |
| Black Kids | -3.45 |
| Dropkick Murphys | -3.50 |
| All That Remains | -3.56 |
| Disturbed | -3.64 |
| Rise Against | -3.73 |
| Kid Rock | -3.86 |
| Amon Amarth | -3.88 |
| The Offspring | -3.89 |
| Avril Lavigne | -3.93 |
| MGMT | -3.94 |
| Fall Out Boy | -3.97 |
| Dragonforce | -4.02 |
| 30 Seconds To Mars | -4.08 |
| Billy Talent | -4.13 |
| Bad Religion | -4.13 |
| Metallica | -4.14 |
| Avenged Sevenfold | -4.23 |
| The Killers | -4.27 |
| Nightwish | -4.37 |
| Arctic Monkeys | -4.40 |
| Chromeo | -4.42 |
| Green Day | -4.43 |
| Oasis | -4.45 |
| The Strokes | -4.49 |
| System of a Down | -4.51 |
| Blink 182 | -4.52 |
| Bloc Party | -4.53 |
| Katy Perry | -4.76 |
| Barenaked Ladies | -4.76 |
| Breaking Benjamin | -4.80 |
| My Chemical Romance | -4.81 |
| 2Pac | -4.94 |
| Megadeth | -4.97 |
It is interesting to see that Avril Lavigne is louder than Metallica and Katy Perry is louder than Megadeth.
The Quietest Artists
Here are the quietest artists:
| Artist | dB |
|---|---|
| Brian Eno | -17.52 |
| Leonard Cohen | -16.24 |
| Norah Jones | -15.75 |
| Tori Amos | -15.23 |
| Jeff Buckley | -15.21 |
| Neil Young | -14.51 |
| Damien Rice | -14.33 |
| Lou Reed | -14.33 |
| Cat Stevens | -14.22 |
| Bon Iver | -14.14 |
| Enya | -14.13 |
| The Velvet Underground | -14.05 |
| Simon & Garfunkel | -14.03 |
| Pink Floyd | -13.96 |
| Ben Harper | -13.94 |
| Aphex Twin | -13.93 |
| Grateful Dead | -13.85 |
| James Taylor | -13.81 |
| The Very Hush Hush | -13.73 |
| Phish | -13.71 |
| The National | -13.57 |
| Paul Simon | -13.53 |
| Sufjan Stevens | -13.41 |
| Tom Waits | -13.33 |
| Elvis Presley | -13.21 |
| Elliott Smith | -13.06 |
| Celine Dion | -12.97 |
| John Lennon | -12.92 |
| Bright Eyes | -12.92 |
| The Smashing Pumpkins | -12.83 |
| Fleetwood Mac | -12.82 |
| Tool | -12.62 |
| Frank Sinatra | -12.59 |
| A Tribe Called Quest | -12.52 |
| Phil Collins | -12.27 |
| 10,000 Maniacs | -12.04 |
| The Police | -12.02 |
| Bob Dylan | -12.00 |
(note that I’m not including classical artists that tend to dominate the quiet side of the spectrum)
Again, there are caveats with this analysis. Many of the recordings analyzed may be remastered versions that have have had their loudness changed from the original. A proper analysis would be to repeat using recordings where the provenance is well known. There’s an excellent graphic in the wikipedia that shows the effect that remastering has had on 4 releases of a Beatles track.
Loudness as a function of Year
Here’s a plot of the loudness as a function of the year of release of a recording (the provenance caveat applies here too). This shows how loudness has increased over the last 40 years
Loudness as a function of year
I suspect that re-releases and re-masterings are affecting the Loudness averages for years before 1995. Another experiment is needed to sort that all out.
Loudness Histogram:
This table shows the histogram of Loudness:
Histogram of loudness
Average Loudness per genre
This table shows the average loudness as a function of genre. No surprise here, Hip Hop and Rock is loud, while Children’s and Classical is soft:
| Genre | dB |
|---|---|
| Hip Hop | -8.38 |
| Rock | -8.50 |
| Latin | -9.08 |
| Electronic | -9.33 |
| Pop | -9.60 |
| Reggae | -9.64 |
| Funk / Soul | -9.83 |
| Blues | -9.86 |
| Jazz | -11.20 |
| Folk, World, & Country | -11.32 |
| Stage & Screen | -14.29 |
| Classical | -16.63 |
| Children’s | -17.03 |
So, why do we care? Why shouldn’t our music be at maximum loudness? This Youtube video makes it clear:
Luckily, there are enough people that care about this to affect some change. The organization Turn Me Up! is devoted to bringing dynamic range back to music. Turn Me Up! is a non-profit music industry organization working together with a group of highly respected artists and recording professionals to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records.
If I had a choice between a loud album and a dynamic one, I’d certainly go for the dynamic one.
Update: Andy exhorts me to make code samples available – which, of course, is a no-brainer – so here ya go: volume.py
March 24, 2009 at 11:17 am |
There is another website devoted to the same subject, which also has an app you can download to measure the dynamic range of music yourself.
http://www.pleasurizemusic.com
March 24, 2009 at 11:30 am |
@dan – I hadn’t seen that site before … thanks for the link.
March 24, 2009 at 11:22 am |
Publishing your code samples, even for these small simple experiments, would really help people get acquainted with the Echo Nest API.
March 24, 2009 at 11:25 am |
Good suggestion …. I’ll do that.
March 24, 2009 at 11:58 am |
Great analysis, thanks for posting it! One question; isn’t the range of the music more important than the mean loudness? I’m not sure if I care if the average of a track is -9.5 dB, what I care is that the entire track is compressed to -11 dB to -8dB.
Maybe a chart of standard deviation of loudness for each song would reveal something?
March 24, 2009 at 1:08 pm |
@nelson – Good point – although since the loudness is averaged over frames, I worry about clipping for songs that don’t leave much headroom.
March 24, 2009 at 12:57 pm |
[...] This article makes me think it’s not a coincidence that I own 26 of the ‘quietest artists’ albums and only 9 of the ‘loudest artists’ « CodeSOD: Where the Wild Web Things AreThe Daily WTF [...]
March 24, 2009 at 3:20 pm |
Code for drawing the graphs would be nice too, but it’s easy enough with Google Spreadsheets:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-hC6jVAyS8nIdPPADpSgHQ&oid=1&output=image
March 24, 2009 at 3:23 pm |
I just gnuplot to make the plots:
gnuplot> set title “Loudness for song”
gnuplot> set xlabel “time”
gnuplot> set ylabel “dB”
gnuplot> plot “song.dat” using 1:2
March 24, 2009 at 4:11 pm |
I’m with Nelson; it seems like dynamic range is the real question. Something which only uses the space between -8db and -5db isn’t going to sound any worse if it’s boosted to be between -4 and -1.
No?
March 24, 2009 at 4:55 pm |
@Aaron – perhaps, but I’m not 100% sure … for one thing, the dB scale (and how the human ear/mind perceive loudness) is not linear, so I’m not sure if a 3db range at -8db to -5db is the same as between -4db and -1db (but I bet we can find someone who knows….). Second. I think that there may be some transient peaks that are more likely to be clipped if the sound is close to the edge.
June 20, 2009 at 12:44 am
Compression is not the same as normalizing, at all. Making quiet parts louder amplifies noise, but a studio commercial recording with audible noise in 2009 is a sort of nonsense, so the noise gate is applied, often masking silent parts at the same time; high level spikes are compressed too, making sound flat etc. There is nothing wrong with compression technology itself – the problem is in incredible high levels of compression in contemporary releases.
March 24, 2009 at 4:50 pm |
Loudness Wars Revisited…
Über den Mangel an Dynamik in aktuellen Musikproduktionen hatte ich vor knapp zwei Jahren schon geschrieben. Toningenieure nutzen die digitalen Möglichkeiten der Kompression bei Aufnahme und Abmischen, um die Musik immer noch lauter klingen zu lassen…
March 25, 2009 at 1:02 am |
I wish this wasn’t the same old argument, but I’ve (no pun intended) heard it before. I wish I could source this, but another argument against over compression I’ve heard is that the “wall of noise” can actually leave the listener feeling fatigued. I’m being clear about it being over compression, because this effect is desired by ‘heavy’ bands because it does lend to a chunky sound that they are looking for. It does drive me nuts however, because bands that do that make me wonder why they bother having a bassist.
March 25, 2009 at 1:24 am |
plamere…Db is on a logarithmic scale, which actually it is linear since exponential functions are linear. The range of sound intensity the human ear can deal with between just barley hearing it to blowing your eardrums right out of your head is HUGE (its based on sustainable pressure) so it’s easier to rate it as a logarithm. 3dB is 3dB where ever you look. Don’t quote me, physics was 30 beers ago so feel free to refute.
March 25, 2009 at 4:41 am |
@Joeseph – even though the db scale is linear, I don’t think the human perception of dB is linear – Fletcher-Munson curves are a good representation of how the human ear/brain perceives loudness – and these curves are non-linear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher-Munson_curves
June 25, 2009 at 2:30 am
fletcher-munson curves are a plot of the human ears frequency response at different amplitudes. the human ear doesnt have a flat frequency reponse, and thats what fletcher-munson curves prove
the dBSPL scale was invented to convert a non-linear set of numbers (the measure of air pressure (unit: pascals)) into a linear one. Joseph rabb is right, 3dB is 3dB no matter where in the dynamic range of human hearing you’re talking about.
March 26, 2009 at 10:29 am |
[...] started commenting on this post about the loudness wars, and decided fuck commenting I’M GOING TO USE MY MR. MICROPHONE HERE [...]
March 26, 2009 at 6:04 pm |
YEAH V-SNARES lol it is INTENSE THOUGH
great read
March 26, 2009 at 7:09 pm |
It’s funny that venetian snares is the #1 loudest artist since his music is literally just loud noise. (BTW I’m a fan of his music, don’t get me wrong).
I’m really annoyed at the loudness trend though. I believe I read about this somewhere a couple of years ago and it’s was kind of I knew there was something odd about some music, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. After reading about this it all made sense.
Now to figure out how we undo this thing.
March 27, 2009 at 2:41 am |
And you used MP3s to do this? MP3s you encoded yourself from a CD-Rip or MP3s downloaded from the internet? Because this is all completely useless info when you use MP3 because of something called MP3-Gain. Give me some of your files and I can make Dave Brubeck clip harder than Metallica or Muse together and make Venetian Snares appear even quieter than brian eno.
You failed, dude.
December 1, 2009 at 1:05 pm |
You failed, retard. You can’t compress sound with “MP3_Gain” (Replay Gain).
March 27, 2009 at 9:12 am |
Interesting post ! Do you know what measure is used to judge the loudness ? RMS ? A-weighted RMS ? LEQ ? Or…?
I think the average-loudness-by-artist thing might be misleading – Metallica are lower than Avril Lavigne because some of their early albums are great, dynamic records, but all of hers are recent and over-compressed. Might be worth pointing that out.
The overall loudness is a bit of a red herring, too – people use their volume controls. If the Metallica, Stooges & Pistols examples were played back at equivalent volumes, their loudness would feel similar.
Finally, interesting as this analysis is, it doesn’t take into account HOW the records were made loud. For example, Anarchy sounds distorted but still better than “Death Magnetic”, because it hasn’t been digitally clipped. Analogue clipping is preferable to digital, on the whole.
On the other hand, “Some Might Say” by Oasis *has* been digitally clipped but doesn’t sound as crushed or over-compressed.
Complicated issue…
I posted some similar discussion a while back here.
March 27, 2009 at 1:05 pm |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed « Music Machinery Krasse Scheisse, Avril Lavigne ist lauter als Megadeth. Nur in dem Fall ist Lauter = Schlechter. (tags: music analysis) [...]
March 29, 2009 at 10:03 am |
Great post Paul. As for others in this thread, for me loudness is inversely related to music I like. I guess it’s another audio feature that predicts something interesting, but for boring reasons, like zero crossing rate.
@Iza : I would be worried about gain on the MP3s if Paul had encoded them purposefully for this demo and cheated. If he’s just sampling MP3s from the wild then I can’t imagine there will be any reliable relation between the use of gain and artist or genre. Anyway, this effect is well-documented and is well understood by anyone who knows how music is produced to arise from the overuse of compression in mastering, not from MP3 encoder parameters.
March 29, 2009 at 12:55 pm |
@doug – thanks for the defense against Iza’s comments, I usually just ignore those type of comments.
P
March 29, 2009 at 11:52 am |
@plamere – spooky, I did something almost exactly the same on exactly the same day last week. You can see my results here, with links to the source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/etdm/3383452670/
I found that you need to ignore anything pre 1990 to catch remastered releases, or ignore values falling outside +/- 1 standard deviation from the mean for each year. You need a rather large sample of source files though if you’re going to do the latter.
March 29, 2009 at 12:53 pm |
@lj Indeed, very spooky – I saw the same thing too, where certain releases were likely remasters that had been made louder, but I was uncomfortable just throwing away the data that didn’t fit. The best thing to do really is to only deal with tracks where one knows exactly which release it is coming from.
March 31, 2009 at 3:55 pm |
[...] [...]
April 1, 2009 at 12:40 pm |
[...] Read the rest of this post Print all_things_di220:http://voices.allthingsd.com/20090401/the-loudness-war-analyzed/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_buzz Sharevar obj = SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “The Loudness War Analyzed”, url: “http://voices.allthingsd.com/20090401/the-loudness-war-analyzed/” },{button:false});var elem = document.getElementById(“share-10029-0.95477900 1238604053″);obj.attachButton(elem); Comment Tagged: Voices, entertainment, media, music, emotional range, Music Machinery, Paul Lamere, recorded music, recording studios | permalink Sphere.Inline.search(“”, “http://voices.allthingsd.com/20090401/the-loudness-war-analyzed/”); [...]
April 1, 2009 at 1:48 pm |
@plamere – thanks for the link. I’m looking at the curves and it’s throwing frequency into the mix. Db is still Db, but your point of perception is taken. You also have to consider the curves are going to change based on per person since hearing is unique to each person. That’s going to leave you a three variable problem with infinite solutions. Ouch. Yeah, most of those solutions are going to fit in a pattern, but I don’t know. Seems like a lot to think about. You might just have to linearize what you have just to make the data manageable.
April 1, 2009 at 4:00 pm |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed « Music Machinery – Really good explanation of what what compression and the resulting loudness changes has done to the dynamic range of recorded music. [...]
April 3, 2009 at 12:23 am |
Hi Paul: I just came across your link. Excellent work, particularly with the average loudness vs. time plot.
I’m obliged to link to a free tool I wrote a year ago that also does dynamic range estimation like the Pleasurize tool does, but uses a considerably more useful loudness model, and has a much more comprehensive set of analyses. And was first :)
http://audiamorous.blogspot.com/2008/01/pfpf-experimental-estimator-of-dynamic_13.html
April 9, 2009 at 5:51 am |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed [...]
April 20, 2009 at 5:16 pm |
The issue is fairly old (but is of course still a huge problem). Robinson proposed a solution around 2001 and wrote some code that was integrated into Media Jukebox probably around 2003. http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/ includes code in the links
May 17, 2009 at 1:32 pm |
[...] CEBIT i år och satellitradio gör succé bland yrkeschaufförer i USA. Artister med världens tystaste produktioner (klicka för att lyssna på Spotify): 1. Brian Eno [...]
May 17, 2009 at 1:32 pm |
[...] CEBIT i år och satellitradio gör succé bland yrkeschaufförer i USA. Artister med världens tystaste produktioner (klicka för att lyssna på Spotify): 1. Brian Eno [...]
May 22, 2009 at 6:33 pm |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed (Music Machinery) [...]
May 30, 2009 at 5:10 pm |
Wow. Great article. Your graphs represent the problem better than the normal waveform images. I’ve also become really troubled by this, especially since the YouTube video that showed the level of dynamic compression in Rdiohead’s Nude.
I think recording studios/artists that are producing loud albums need to look at the successful artists of the past and currently that produce ‘quiet’ albums. They can release loud versions to MTV and the radio and whatever but for the people that buy the CDs and like the music… why not keep it good? Glad to see Justin Vernon and Tool way up there. If Tool, as a loud band – i.e. prog metal, meant to be played loudly – can make great, dynamic albums, what’s holding back everyone else in that genre area?
Here’s my blog post with the Radiohead video: http://mellowsmusings.blogspot.com/2009/05/loudness-war.html
July 23, 2009 at 10:38 pm |
Great article!
Compression may very well be the reason people (audiophiles) say they can hear a difference between CD’s and records or simply prefer to listen to records.
This happens to be one area where audiophiles do notice something; the problem is most people don’t know what it is. For lack of knowledge, they say is because vinyl sounds better than CDs.
When you go to a live performance, the dynamic range might well be around 100 db for classical music and something less for rock music; albeit the average level for rock music may be higher. This should not be an issue for CDs, since 16 bits is about 96 db (6 db per bit).
According to the IEEE, vinyl records tend to support only a 70 db dynamic range (which is only 11.6 bits). This means that even the best vinyl recordings do not exceed the dynamic range capability of a CD. Sorry Audiophiles – it’s math!
Audiophiles spend a great deal of time listening to recorded material; much more time listening than the average person and really listening to the music, not just using music as background. The common lament among audiophiles is that CDs are less pleasurable to listen to than vinyl records. You hear comments like records sound warmer! I can’t listen to my CDs as long as I can listen to my records. Compression!
I have a business that digitizes records and burns CDs (CD-Rs) for people, mostly audiophiles. In blind tests that I conducted, (and I’m not biased either way – I am an engineer) the listeners (both audiophiles and casual listeners) could NOT distinguish between the record and the CD. Is it real or is it …?
One reason I was given for the compression of CD’s, is that during playback of wide dynamic range material in cars, the sound will drop below audiability during quiet passages when the loud passages are set for normal volume. So, why not put the compressor in the car CD player?
It’s a real shame, that we don’t use the available dynamic range of CD’s. imagine how great recorded music would sound if we did.
July 28, 2009 at 10:54 am |
[...] http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/23/the-loudness-war/ [...]
August 6, 2009 at 1:05 pm |
In recent testing of HD radio, I discovered that the dynamic range is horrible! Now to determine if it’s the receiver or station that is destroying the signal. I used digital optical out from receiver to digital optical line-in on soundcard. Was expecting great waveform but it’s narrow, loud, with no range. Disappointed but research continues.
August 19, 2009 at 7:26 am |
Notice it’s all the ones whose listeners probably wouldn’t care about sound quality? Nice comparisons up there.
August 21, 2009 at 1:41 pm |
[...] George Graham, Guitar Gear.org, Music Machinery.com [...]
August 30, 2009 at 10:07 am |
[...] was right. this are few links about the loudness war: loudness wars (wikipedia) The Loudness War Analyzed (on musicmachinery) loudness wars (on stereosubversion) dynamic range foundation – an organization defending the [...]
October 14, 2009 at 8:44 am |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed by Paul [...]
October 14, 2009 at 10:14 am |
[...] zich hard maakt voor het terugbrengen van de dynamiek in de muziek. Ze constateren dat die Loudness War, zoals ze het zelf noemen, geen bewuste keuze is, maar eerder iets is omdat iedereen het doet. De [...]
October 20, 2009 at 2:06 pm |
[...] beweging zich hard maakt voor het terugbrengen van de dynamiek in de muziek. Ze constateren dat die Loudness War, zoals ze het zelf noemen, geen bewuste keuze is, maar eerder iets is omdat iedereen het doet. De [...]
October 27, 2009 at 1:15 pm |
I like the list for the various artists, it would be great if you could review new music based on the merits of the production value. I recently bought the new Chevelle Sci-Fi Crimes and its a crime indeed. You can’t tell if there is a rhythm section…its sooooo loud. Their previous albums aren’t as bad. Anyway, I bought the CD really wishing I hadn’t spent the money. If this crap continues I will stop buying new music. If Paul can manage to review new music when its released then post it…wouldn’t that be a powerfull motivator to record execs to stop putting out noise? Just a thought.
November 25, 2009 at 7:08 pm |
[...] interesting blog by Paul Lamere with loudness analysed through a range of [...]
December 23, 2009 at 10:04 am |
Actually from your shitty boses etc the shitty mixes sound “acceptable” but once you get some real speakers&pay attention for positioning&room effects you just can’t listen to those overly loud albums anymore.
same goes for headphones, i occasionally dig my old shitty headphones to listen some really bad quality recordings, becouse their “shitty” soundquality waters it down to acceptable.
but hey what can you do when common folk doesn’t pay attention to at all speaker is just a speaker, positioning doesnt matter and recording quality is shait anyways so if they buy better speakers what’s the upgrade?
December 29, 2009 at 8:56 am |
I just found this site because I’m listening to a Commodores record (vinyl) from 1975 that actually distorts because it’s too loud. The vocal don’t sound that great like that – but by the looks of it it could be worse. Thanks for the research!
December 29, 2009 at 9:03 am |
As an addition – sounds like a mastering problem rather than a recording problem.
January 7, 2010 at 5:55 am |
This could ne another reason why we enjoy a lot listening to CD of 10-15 years ago, as they sound “fresh” with all the instruments and deails, without distortion or quality loss.
January 23, 2010 at 11:04 am |
[...] The Loudness War Analyzed (Music Machinery) [...]
January 31, 2010 at 10:44 am |
Nice short summary of the issue. What the people responsible for this fail to realise is that while you might catch people’s attention for the first couple of seconds with its loudness standing out against the other tracks (which in itself depends on the idea that not all others are competing in the loudness wars as well), the most common reaction of people is to turn the volume down, switch the music off altogether, change the channel, etc. In addition, listening to loud mastering is tiresome, so while you might stand out among other records, people enjoy (and buy!) the well-mastered music much more. And it becomes even more pointless today: not in the least due to the loudness wars, customers now depend on technologies such as ReplayGain to even out playback volume, and demand for devices supporting these ideas increases.
And those stupid asses still wonder why no one wants to pay money for their music anymore.
February 9, 2010 at 10:36 am |
This is great! Thanks for doing this, Paul – I think I’m going to show it to my class today.
One thing, though – are you using an internal echonest library for this? I don’t see the ‘audio’ module in the pyechonest package.
February 9, 2010 at 10:44 am |
Andrew:
Look at the Track object in pyechonest. Look at the track.loudness() method to get the overall loudness of track and look at track.segments() to get the individual audio segments. Each segment has a loudness as well. Also, look at this alpha API at:
http://notes.variogr.am/post/359894394/primer-on-new-echo-nest-search-tracks-capsule-and
That allows you to get loudness info without having to upload tracks.
Paul