Loudness

What is loud?

Might seem like an obvious question, but I think there are some things to consider. At it’s core, loudness is considered to be amplitude. But beyond that there are things to think about.

In modern music production there is a movement that tries to make everything as loud as possible. but in a very particular way. This subcurrnet of music production culture is laser focused on making the music as evenly loud as possible from beginning to end.

The goal is to create a brick wall of sound.

In the persuit of this onslaught of audio the audience will be blown away by the sheer mass of sound comign directly at their faces without a moments rest.

Here’s the thing, though…

Is that really…

…a good thing?

To some the answer is obvious, but there is another perspective that is worth considering. Does music really feel good to us when it is this loud…

…or, to be more accurate…

…this compressed.

You see, in the pursuit of this thing called ‘loudness’ some in the music producer community have discovered the relatively new long lost are of compression. The reality of this new idea of ‘loudness’ is that it is really not ‘loudness’ at all, but rather, extreme levels of compression, that enable a music producer to squash a piece of music to within an inch of it’s life. The result of this is that a piece of music that has been compressed this much will be louder than another piece of music that is not compressed at the same volume level. Without moving the volume dial (slider? buttons? …something else?) the ultra compressed music will certainly be louder. And the human ear generally likes things when they are louder.

But there is a cost.

…and this cost must be paid for with, and only with, dynamics.

Ultimately, what compression does is reduce dynamic range so that a peice of audio and appear to be more even in volume over time. The goal of a compressor is to lessen the amount of amplitude difference from moment to moment to create a more even and smooth volume experience for a given piece of audio. This can be a very good thing if a piece of audio varies wildly in volume over time and can be too loud one more and too quiet the next, which can be a very important issue to address.

But like all good things, this can be taken too far.

For you see, when one adds an extreme amount of compression to an entire peice of music, the evening out of volume over time to such a degree can start to remove something in the music that is very important, which is dynamic range.

Noise in audio is the sound of all frequencies played at the same energy level, or amplitude. If one tries to compress all the frequencies of their piece of music to the point that they are all appraoching the same amplitude over time, then what is being achieved is essentially turning that piece of music into something resembling noise.