Music: What's the Point?
Take a look at Why music really is getting louder
My first major objection: What is the context of this ‘music’? As much as I like good jazz or chamber music, it’s not well suited for driving in a car, or listening on laptop speakers.
I can simultaneously maintain a “who cares” with a “music is dead to me anyway” attitude. If they’re going to keep putting out crap, why do I care how it’s produced?
So many people I know are wallowing in music history, not following the exciting new, over-compressed releases. They search for old music from their formative years, and develop iPod playlists from before the digital age.
I don’t even have and iPod. I practically stopped carrying my discman around, too. I love music, and I want to listen to it in a place where I can pay attention. When I am out running around, I like the sounds of the environment better. I started to feel guilty about blocking out those sounds.
“Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars.”
This is fine by me - but that music will no longer be appropriate for other situations where I have the quiet I need to appreciate dynamic range.
I think I would prefer we select our compression level on the player. That way, we could decide for ourselves how compressed we need it to be - like high for the pub, but lower for headphones and a good stereo system. But, this clashes with the desire to compress the data for digital downloads. Compressed sound means better data compression and faster downloads. I was also hoping rising speed of Internet connections and larger storage capacities would lessen our concern with file size.
Whoa! - This bit turns out to be wrong, and I know better than that: The article I linked insinuates that compressed music would be preferred for quick downloading, but data compression on sound files takes advantage of psychoacoustics, and compressed music without as much dynamic range is usually harder to compress. The algorithms keep finding significant signals that must be represented. So there is this confusion based on using the same word for different ideas. Many people have read both forms of ‘compress’ without a full technical understanding (and who could blame them). But when you pretend to be knowledgeable on a subject where few people in your audience could correct you, then your audience will start to talk like you do. And the circle of ignorance expands…
I promised myself that I would write a sound editor program in Windows. My first step is to write a library of analysis code - a quick battery of statistics on the sound file. When I read about this problem - Music is too loud - I start to rethink what sort of things I should be measuring in these files.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 09 Jun 2007 19:23:00 GMT
