MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

Create Digital Music has a piece on the latest front in raging Loudness Wars, which I highly recommend: Dynamic Range Strikes Back with Campaign, Plug-in.  Campaigning against hyper-limited, over-loud CDs is nothing new, and largely a failure.  CDs, and now MP3s, just keep getting louder.  The problem is there’s no way to know what you’re missing, since virtually nothing released has any dynamic range to speak of.  So there are few positive examples of benefits.  The new development is a plug-in that displays dynamic range in a positive way.  The plug shows a simple, single number representing the average level of the program.  Human nature being what it is, bigger is better, so a bigger number suggests more of something, dynamic range in this case.

Dynamic range refers to the difference between quiet and loud parts of a song.  The greater that gap, the more impact the loud parts have, and generally, the more expressive the music can be.  In earlier generations, this expression was a precious commodity, understood by everyone.  Think of marching bands or symphonies: the loud crescendos, as the music peaks, are what defines excitement.  So it’s ironic that rock and pop music, with intrinsically greater potential for dynamics and excitement, lack this quality entirely.

Algorythmix’ plug-based meter will probably be used by few normal folks.  But we can hope artists, engineers, producers and music professionals take notice.  If they do, music will quickly start sounding much better to us fans.