Reuters: Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012...urce=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=309301

(this is indeed another loudness war article)

 

Pop/country is the worst offender.

 

Here we go again.

"pop songs" = too general a metric. What songs did they use for this research? It was in Spain also so if they went by pop music in Spain that could have very different results than say the US.

Not saying that pop music isn't loud, only that we can't assume that this report is a report on new music in general. But I expect the sharks to take the bait anyway....

 

any serious musician could have told you this

 

Duh!!

 

I am so tired about all the loudness crap...besides this, almost all new songs you can hear on the radio have the same harmonies...it is so boring...
Today I did some more needledrops and one more time I was lucky about the dynamic range of old records...
Well, there are different musical genres to listen - some of them sound cool with overcompressed and extreme loud levels without any dynamics, for example all the Metal Core stuff and some Death Metal productions - where it should sound loud and fat and brutal...but all the useless remasters from stuff of the 70s or the 80s are sometimes so bad...unbelievable...
Some weeks ago I got a CD from swedish Doom Metal gods SORCERER...it includes both demos and some unreleased stuff...first release was in 1995 and it sounded good...now I bought it again for one more track, not included on the first edition...the new CD was remastered and sounds horrible...besides a too strong compression, there are some very strange noises on some tracks - sounds like a conversation flaw from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz...hard to explain, but you can hear some strange distortion in the high frequencies and on quiet parts some constant cheep noise is audible....what the hell is that...???
There are more releases out there with this flaw...for example JAG PANZER - Chain Of Command on CD (Century Media)....compared to a tape copy from the early nineties (I own), the official release sounds so terrible...
But back to the loudness thing: As I said, sometimes it works well (on music which should sound straight-in-your-face), but in 95% I agree with all the other audiophiles here...music needs dynamics !!! Let it breath !!!

 

Made it to the Reddit front page today --

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/x6u5n/pop_music_too_loud_and_all_sounds_the_same/

 

The article (which I have read - how bout that) does delve into other useful memes than 'everything is loud'.

The loudness can work against you: the recent Passion Pit - Gossamer stream on NPR was unlistenable, it sounded to be mp3 processed from an awfully compressed and maximised original by an intern (my guess). The Spotify stream is better. This is not the first time, either..

The definition of 'pop' music is a little narrow now, since with apps and streaming many more people have access to music that's very popular but not (and never) in the charts or on regular radio.

I particularly liked the bits about how much more music there was about now.

 

Here is the test...for guitarists anyway.

Take a mix of songs from the past year and learn them. Should take a minute or so. Don't even need the sheet music most of the time.

Take a mix from the 60s and seventies. Beatles, Yes, Stones etc etc

Get ready to sit down and learn them for a couple days.

 

I listen to it and wonder if there are more than one woman or man singing and playing every song recorded over the past two years.

 

I KNEW it!

 

No, it's legit.

 

Does any of that really make a difference to the less discerning listener with tinny earbuds?

 

Most of the less discerning listeners (which is most people) do not care about this. If they did care, we would have only had only one CD version of just the Who's Next album in print, Steve's 1980s CD mastering. Bonus tracks would be part of a separate collection away from the album, but then, record companies wouldn't make as much money as they do with the constant repackaging and remasters and that's what it boils down to.

 

It's actually just an analysis, not a conclusion. We're assuming using our own biases.. not very scientific.

Try this summary: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-music-evolving-or-is-it-just-getting-louder/

with an equally misleading title.

 

I lost a few brain cells while skimming through that thread and was surprised there were no pictures of cats.

Still, neat to see the topic get so much discussion (it has 2000+ comments over there) where non-audiophiles and typical music fans are commenting about it.

 

Breaking news: I detect some sound differences between 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson and You Don't Have To Be A Baby To Cry by the Caravelles. I don't think they sound alike.

 

I thought it was pretty silly for scientists to do this scientifically.

 

I just listened to the Top 50 songs from 2011 -- in a row -- and I was pretty surprised at how similar they sounded. If you were to take a comparable group of 50 hits from, say, 1966 or 1976, I guarantee you, they'd be a lot different.

I think music really has kind of been homogenized to a kind of "sameness," particularly for specific genres. It's not all terrible, but there isn't a lot of variety, at least not in what I hear.

 

There's a lot of potential money in analysis of major market items.

Look at Pandora. Started with an algorithm and method for classifying some traits of music.

It hasn't appeared on the 'improbable research' list .. yet...

 

Yeah, I've noticed this too, and figure it has something to do with modern Pro-Tooled production techniques and programmed/sampled instrumentation blanding out differences between performers. Whereas Back In The Day you could have 10 bands doing 12-bar-based songs and not all sounding the same owing to little idiosyncracies in their playing or the recording environment. It doesn't help either when you have producers like "Dr Luke" recycling the same song through multiple performers (see "California Gurlz" by Katy Perry and "Tik Tok" by Kesha)...

 

http://www.cbc.ca/day6/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2263849725

Discussion from musicologists. Pretentious, in a word.