sound wars and dispersion

artists are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the compressed and ill-defined sound of their music on mp3s and cds. rolling stone reports on the ongoing sound wars:

“We’ve been fighting the limitations of digital audio since it first came out,” says [T-Bone] Burnett, the veteran musician and producer. “The artists lost control of the process, and it just got to the point where the Dude could not abide.”

most of the concerns stem from the practice of MIXING EVERYTHING AT THE SAME VOLUME: EXTRY LOUD. robert levine, also writing in rolling stone, offers a refreshingly comprehensible primer on dynamic range compression in contemporary music.

the basic idea is that every channel, every instrument, and every musician is cranked to eleven these days. this practice gives ya non-stop midrange punchiness throughout a song's duration, delivered with all the sensitivity of metallagher.

the figure above shows waveforms from an ideal-typical example, 2006's i bet that you look good on the dance floor. there's almost no range whatsoever, with the (volume) pedal to the metal throughout.

the next figure is from 1991. hardly a ballad, nirvana's smells like teen spirit still offers much more range. as i recall, madison's good-guy producer butch vig took some heat for double-tracking the guitars on teen spirit, but the resulting hit still offered way more crescendo/decrescendo than today's songs (for those truly obsessed, check out the loudness war or wiki).

next time i teach statistics, i might use similar examples to illustrate the concept of dispersion and variance. think about how your favorite old pieces might be mixed in 2008. hearing miles davis' fifty-year-old so what, the musicians made room for one another by simmering down and heating up (check out the handoff to coltrane around 1:57; then, just for fun, my favorite things a few years later). it wasn't just jazz, of course. everything on the radio seemed to offer greater dispersion in the 1970s than today. what would a rangemaster like al green do? i'm guessing that, like t-bone burnett, the dude would not abide.