Tell Me :
Talk
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-27 07:29 by ChrisM.
Erm, no. Think "loudness war" and "crushed dynamics" instead...
Not the mix; the mastering.
Just nowadays you have to decrease the volume of your speakers to make the music somehow more listenable...
Talk about your favorite band.
For information about how to use this forum please check out forum help and policies.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
Send It To me
()
Date: July 27, 2012 04:09
erm, doesn't loudness depend on the volume your speakers are set to?
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
latebloomer
()
Date: July 27, 2012 04:09
Here's the article, if you're having trouble opening the link.
Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder?
By John Matson | July 26, 2012
Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century.
A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to look for widespread changes in music’s character over the years. The findings, published online July 26 in Scientific Reports, show that some trends do emerge over the decades—none of them necessarily good. (Scientific American and Scientific Reports are both parts of Nature Publishing Group.)
The researchers based their analysis on the Million Song Dataset, a publicly available 280-gigabyte file that provides a sort of background sketch—name, duration, tempo, and so on—of songs from nearly 45,000 artists. Of the million songs therein, 464,411 came out between 1955 and 2010 and include data on both the sonic characteristics and the year of release.
Joan Serrà, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, and his colleagues examined three aspects of those songs: timbre (which “accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality,” according to Serrà and his colleagues); pitch (which “roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements”); and loudness (more on that below).
After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.
Finally, it comes as no surprise that music has gotten louder. A piece of music’s loudness is an intrinsic characteristic of the recording, not to be confused with the listener-controlled volume. “Basically, the audio signal, when recorded and stored, is physically bounded to be between certain values (+1 and –1 volts in original recording systems),” Serrà explained in an email. “You can record signals fluctuating between –0.2 and +0.2 or between –0.6 and +0.6 (positive and negative fluctuations are necessary to make the loudspeaker membrane move). That’s the intrinsic loudness level we’re talking about.”
For years audiophiles have decried the “loudness wars”—the gradual upping of recorded music’s loudness over time, in an apparent effort to grab listeners’ attention. Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy. (This two-minute YouTube video does a great job of demonstrating how excessive loudness saps richness and depth from a recording.) Indeed, Serrà and his colleagues found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.
It’s an interesting study, and it seems to support the popular anecdotal observation that pop music of yore was better, or at least more varied, than today’s top-40 stuff. (A recent study also found that song lyrics are darker and more self-focused than they used to be.) But I did wonder if there was a selection bias in play here. The Million Song Dataset, huge as it is, may not provide a representative slice of pop music, especially for old songs. Its contents are heavily weighted to modern music: the database contains only 2,650 songs released between 1955 and 1959, but nearly two orders of magnitude more—177,808 songs—released between 2005 and 2009. That’s because it draws on what’s popular now, as well as what has been digitized and made available for download. And the songs of yesteryear that people enjoy today (as oldies) may not be the same ones that people enjoyed when those songs first came out.
Let’s assume for the moment that the trends identified in the new study—especially the homogenous timbres and restricted pitch sequences—are bad. Then the rare song that bucked those trends, offering up novel melodies and sonic textures, would stand out as being good. Therefore, that song would have a better chance than its contemporaries of surviving the test of time—that is, a better chance of finding itself digitized and widely played some 50 years after its release, thereby boosting its odds of inclusion in the Million Song Dataset. Meanwhile, the blander tunes of decades past would have faded into analog obscurity. The relatively few old songs in such a database, then, would tend to be more sonically interesting than the average song of today, and any analysis comparing old songs to new would likely reflect that. So I wondered if part of what this study is telling us is that bland music can fool us, but not for long.
Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”
Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder?
By John Matson | July 26, 2012
Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century.
A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to look for widespread changes in music’s character over the years. The findings, published online July 26 in Scientific Reports, show that some trends do emerge over the decades—none of them necessarily good. (Scientific American and Scientific Reports are both parts of Nature Publishing Group.)
The researchers based their analysis on the Million Song Dataset, a publicly available 280-gigabyte file that provides a sort of background sketch—name, duration, tempo, and so on—of songs from nearly 45,000 artists. Of the million songs therein, 464,411 came out between 1955 and 2010 and include data on both the sonic characteristics and the year of release.
Joan Serrà, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, and his colleagues examined three aspects of those songs: timbre (which “accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality,” according to Serrà and his colleagues); pitch (which “roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements”); and loudness (more on that below).
After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.
Finally, it comes as no surprise that music has gotten louder. A piece of music’s loudness is an intrinsic characteristic of the recording, not to be confused with the listener-controlled volume. “Basically, the audio signal, when recorded and stored, is physically bounded to be between certain values (+1 and –1 volts in original recording systems),” Serrà explained in an email. “You can record signals fluctuating between –0.2 and +0.2 or between –0.6 and +0.6 (positive and negative fluctuations are necessary to make the loudspeaker membrane move). That’s the intrinsic loudness level we’re talking about.”
For years audiophiles have decried the “loudness wars”—the gradual upping of recorded music’s loudness over time, in an apparent effort to grab listeners’ attention. Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy. (This two-minute YouTube video does a great job of demonstrating how excessive loudness saps richness and depth from a recording.) Indeed, Serrà and his colleagues found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.
It’s an interesting study, and it seems to support the popular anecdotal observation that pop music of yore was better, or at least more varied, than today’s top-40 stuff. (A recent study also found that song lyrics are darker and more self-focused than they used to be.) But I did wonder if there was a selection bias in play here. The Million Song Dataset, huge as it is, may not provide a representative slice of pop music, especially for old songs. Its contents are heavily weighted to modern music: the database contains only 2,650 songs released between 1955 and 1959, but nearly two orders of magnitude more—177,808 songs—released between 2005 and 2009. That’s because it draws on what’s popular now, as well as what has been digitized and made available for download. And the songs of yesteryear that people enjoy today (as oldies) may not be the same ones that people enjoyed when those songs first came out.
Let’s assume for the moment that the trends identified in the new study—especially the homogenous timbres and restricted pitch sequences—are bad. Then the rare song that bucked those trends, offering up novel melodies and sonic textures, would stand out as being good. Therefore, that song would have a better chance than its contemporaries of surviving the test of time—that is, a better chance of finding itself digitized and widely played some 50 years after its release, thereby boosting its odds of inclusion in the Million Song Dataset. Meanwhile, the blander tunes of decades past would have faded into analog obscurity. The relatively few old songs in such a database, then, would tend to be more sonically interesting than the average song of today, and any analysis comparing old songs to new would likely reflect that. So I wondered if part of what this study is telling us is that bland music can fool us, but not for long.
Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
Edith Grove
()
Date: July 27, 2012 04:45
.......and the drugs are getting stronger. 
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
ChrisM
()
Date: July 27, 2012 05:29
In part. The mix plays a role as well...Quote
Send It To me
erm, doesn't loudness depend on the volume your speakers are set to?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-27 07:29 by ChrisM.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
stonesnow
()
Date: July 27, 2012 06:27
Say what?! Can't hear you! The music's too loud! It's either the BOSE headphones or the iPod earbuds!
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
dcba
()
Date: July 27, 2012 09:59
Quote
Send It To me
erm, doesn't loudness depend on the volume your speakers are set to?
Erm, no. Think "loudness war" and "crushed dynamics" instead...
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
noughties
()
Date: July 27, 2012 15:54
ABB was recorded very loud. Besides, there`s all the Katy Perrys of yore...
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
neylon79
()
Date: July 27, 2012 16:32
Loudness is not the volume, but the average amplitude of the the sound wave.
When you hear music, there are things like drum hits that stick out for an instant, or the singer saying a T or P sound in a word. These are the peak sounds of a sound wave, that occur for such a short period of time they aren't really notice by your ears/brain.
Your ears and brain basically hear the average volume of everything coming at them. Getting a louder recording has always bee a goal for the msuci industry, the simple idea being make your record louder on the juke box and it will be noticed. But the analog medium only allows so much of this, so it's not something that really changes the way you percieve the recording, it just makes it stand out or "pop" in a pleasant way.
In the digital age, with the meters showing all peak information I mentioned above, and tools that allow for WAY more compression what happened is that they were able to squash those peaks to be equal to the average information, there is no peak. Then you can crank the signal up to the max level allowed and your average level is now much higher than it ever could be before. But what happens is that it sounds unnatural. If someone were to scream right in your ear, there would be no peak information either, and you'd get a headache from fatigue. This is what happens when you listen to an entire album that is recorded in this loud manner. There are no dynamics (no a soft part of a song, but dynamics of the mix).
Wikipedia has a good article about it.
[en.wikipedia.org]
You can see how the soundwave is squashed.
This youtube video is a simple explanation of the process also-
This is why I will not buy the UMG remasters. They squashed the stones to make them loud like modern music. This is how a bigger bang was made also. The CBS or Virgin issues came out before this loudness war took off, so they both are closer to the original soundwave.
The final step in the loudness wars is that some recordings are pushed even past the maximum level. They intentionally clip those peaks because that distortion is perceived louder to the ears. Now people try to undo the clipping with more software, you can find many modern releases on the internet where someone has "declipped" the recording. There is a bigger bang version out there somewhere like this. When analog tape, tube preamps, etc. were pushed to clipping, it is not nearly as harsh. Analog equipment distorts gradually, so the wave form might be changed, but only slightly, and some of those changes are even appealing, hence tube guitar amp distortion channels. Digital audio clips 100% instantly, so a sine wave turns into a square wave, and sounds harsh and very different from the original.
Sorry for the length.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-27 16:33 by neylon79.
When you hear music, there are things like drum hits that stick out for an instant, or the singer saying a T or P sound in a word. These are the peak sounds of a sound wave, that occur for such a short period of time they aren't really notice by your ears/brain.
Your ears and brain basically hear the average volume of everything coming at them. Getting a louder recording has always bee a goal for the msuci industry, the simple idea being make your record louder on the juke box and it will be noticed. But the analog medium only allows so much of this, so it's not something that really changes the way you percieve the recording, it just makes it stand out or "pop" in a pleasant way.
In the digital age, with the meters showing all peak information I mentioned above, and tools that allow for WAY more compression what happened is that they were able to squash those peaks to be equal to the average information, there is no peak. Then you can crank the signal up to the max level allowed and your average level is now much higher than it ever could be before. But what happens is that it sounds unnatural. If someone were to scream right in your ear, there would be no peak information either, and you'd get a headache from fatigue. This is what happens when you listen to an entire album that is recorded in this loud manner. There are no dynamics (no a soft part of a song, but dynamics of the mix).
Wikipedia has a good article about it.
[en.wikipedia.org]
You can see how the soundwave is squashed.
This youtube video is a simple explanation of the process also-
This is why I will not buy the UMG remasters. They squashed the stones to make them loud like modern music. This is how a bigger bang was made also. The CBS or Virgin issues came out before this loudness war took off, so they both are closer to the original soundwave.
The final step in the loudness wars is that some recordings are pushed even past the maximum level. They intentionally clip those peaks because that distortion is perceived louder to the ears. Now people try to undo the clipping with more software, you can find many modern releases on the internet where someone has "declipped" the recording. There is a bigger bang version out there somewhere like this. When analog tape, tube preamps, etc. were pushed to clipping, it is not nearly as harsh. Analog equipment distorts gradually, so the wave form might be changed, but only slightly, and some of those changes are even appealing, hence tube guitar amp distortion channels. Digital audio clips 100% instantly, so a sine wave turns into a square wave, and sounds harsh and very different from the original.
Sorry for the length.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-27 16:33 by neylon79.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
gimmelittledrink
()
Date: July 27, 2012 18:33
Louder and simpler. Music has been dumbed down like everything else.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
pinkfloydthebarber
()
Date: July 27, 2012 18:54
and lousier
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
custom55
()
Date: July 27, 2012 23:10
[entertainment.nbcnews.com]
simliar article with the Stones mentioned...
Old tunes re-recorded with increased loudness, simpler chord progressions and different instruments could sound new and fashionable. The Rolling Stones in their 50th anniversary year should take note.
simliar article with the Stones mentioned...
Old tunes re-recorded with increased loudness, simpler chord progressions and different instruments could sound new and fashionable. The Rolling Stones in their 50th anniversary year should take note.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
Send It To me
()
Date: July 27, 2012 23:16
the original recording of Honky Tonky Women always seemed to be a loud record, or at least a record that sounds great when you play it loud
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
mr_dja
()
Date: July 28, 2012 07:49
Thank you so much latebloomer &I nelyon79
Peace
Mr DJA
Peace
Mr DJA
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
Palace Revolution 2000
()
Date: July 28, 2012 20:02
Quote
ChrisMIn part. The mix plays a role as well...Quote
Send It To me
erm, doesn't loudness depend on the volume your speakers are set to?
Not the mix; the mastering.
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
Naturalust
()
Date: July 28, 2012 20:29
Itunes normalizes everything to the same relative loudness or volume. Of course you can change the loudness by turning down the volume, they are VERY closely related. If you want to get technical you can measure the average POWER that is sent to you speakers for any given tune.
The fact that stuff is mixed very HOT with less dynamic range obviously adds to the perception that Pop Music is Getting Louder.
Listen to those old Motown and Stax records, the only thing loud was the drums and the dynamic range of them was much better than todays drum sounds. peace
The fact that stuff is mixed very HOT with less dynamic range obviously adds to the perception that Pop Music is Getting Louder.
Listen to those old Motown and Stax records, the only thing loud was the drums and the dynamic range of them was much better than todays drum sounds. peace
Re: OT: Pop Music is Getting Louder
Posted by:
kowalski
()
Date: July 28, 2012 23:57
Quote
Send It To me
erm, doesn't loudness depend on the volume your speakers are set to?
Just nowadays you have to decrease the volume of your speakers to make the music somehow more listenable...
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.
Online Users
blackadder , keef62 , Mabru , mickjagger1009 , NilsHolgersson , philrock90 , spunky , steady , TumblinDice76 , Tumlin73
Guests:
2039
Record Number of Users:
206
on June 1, 2022 23:50
Record Number of Guests:
9627
on January 2, 2024 23:10