The War on Music

You listen to the classic tunes of the Beatles. All is well and good, when you accidentally hit the switch button of your player, changing your “Yellow Submarine” to Green Day’s latest album. Reacting as if holding on a hot pot, you immediately turn the volume down and breathe a sigh of relief. Or not. Ten minutes past the song, you feel that something isn’t right. Even if you love the Green Day album, you just cannot seem to listen to it anymore. You then shut the player off feeling tired and confused. This scenario usually happens when one switches from classic songs to modern ones. This experience is what people call overcompression of the dynamic range. Hail to the loudness war.

The loudness war, or what audiophiles refer to as an assault on music, has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has gotten more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits when it comes to loudness, thanks to the ever-changing digital technology. The “war” points out the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums. But this loudness war could be doing more damage than what meets the ears—this could also be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come.

Music is very similar to speech, being dynamic and all. There are quiet, also loud moments that serve to emphasize each other and relate their meanings through their relative levels of soundness. For example, when a person shouts, the loudness of the shout brings out a message of urgency, anger, or surprise. When the dynamic ranges of songs are heavily reduced for the sake of achieving loudness, the sound becomes similar to someone shouting constantly. Not only is all impact lost, but the constant level of the sound becomes fatiguing to the ears. So the question still remains: why is achieving greater loudness so important that the natural flow of music has been so readily given up? The answer goes way back to the time of the vinyl records.

Loudness of songs has always been a desirable quality for popular music. The louder the song is, the more it stands out from ambient noise and the more it grabs the attention. Studies in the field of psychoacoustics (how humans perceive sound) shows that people judges the loudness of a sound based on its average loudness, not the peak loudness. Back in the early 1960s, record labels began engaging in a loudness battle ever since they observed that louder songs in jukeboxes tended to collect more attention than quieter ones. To be competitive, record companies wanted to raise the loudness of their songs. But the vinyl’s physical properties halted the engineer’s ability to increase the loudness. Since there is a limit on the amount of surface per vinyl disc, gaining loudness means sacrificing playing time. In order to save the cost of manufacturing an excessive number of vinyl discs per album, playing time usually won out over loudness.

The loudness war can end and give rise to the next generation of high-fidelity audio all depends on the attitude of the consumer. Unlike the CD and DVD video, there is no overwhelming industrial push toward the next level of sound quality. How songs and albums will sound depends on whether or not the listener actually cares about the complexity of the music.