Aimee Howarth brings you an interview with The Yorker directors on the final day of the advent articles
Aimee Howarth speaks to YUSU's sabbatical officers about their Christmas Day routine for day 17 of the advent calendar
For the final time this term, Vicky Morris updates you on this weeks film news
50 years after the publication of 'James and the Giant Peach', the works of Roald Dahl continue to celebrate success.
In a time of political upheaval in various parts of the world and a global recession, there is another titanic struggle taking place that slips under the radar of a huge number of people.
The Loudness War has been raging for over 15 years, but what exactly is it, and more importantly, what can we do about it?
When confronted with two pieces of music that are identical save for the volume they are played at, the human mind has a tendency to prefer the louder of the two. This fundamental characteristic in how humans perceive music is the driving force behind a phenomenon known in the industry as the Loudness War; recording companies will record music at increasing levels of loudness each year to make the new music on offer seem original and vibrant.
It’s not necessarily the fact that the record is louder that makes this a really bad thing for music lovers, it’s the way in which this is achieved; namely by reducing the dynamic range of an album during recording. That is, making the quiet bits a lot louder and the really loud bits slightly quieter, the overall effect being a much louder average.
The problem with this gradual change in volume that has taken place over the last few decades, is that it is often very difficult to notice what is being done to the music we listen to.
Listen to a recording of any album made before 1990 and then compare it to, for example, an album by Rihanna or Coldplay. The difference in the average loudness is often around 6 decibels.
When you bear in mind that when CDs are recorded they have a limited maximum amplitude of around 90 decibels, this is a pretty worrying percentage increase that we are given absolutely no control over.
However, there is a glimmer of hope. The Loudness War has many vocal opponents in the recording community, the most prominent of which is probably Bob Dylan. His exact words on the subject were:
"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static." The Rolling Stones Magazine 2007.
Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, said to The Times, 2007:
"A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don’t trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up."
So, what can you do about it? Buy albums that haven’t been compressed. The reason the record industry does this is because it is an easy way of raising profits, but if the cost of this is removing the decision to turn up the volume out of our hands, why should we let them?.
Many critics say that this is tantamount to having subliminal messaging in TV adverts, and if that practice is banned why is this one not? Turn Me Up is a non-profit organization which is arguing for the rights of the artists.
They want to give musicians the choice back as to how loud they want their music to be, and they are also starting a sticker campaign in participating music stores, where ‘good’ albums that are not compressed will be made stamped with an official sticker so you know what to buy if you want to help make a difference. Join the fight to give music back to the people!
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