Is There a Loudness War?

There's an interesting debate going on in the Music Production world with accusations of sonic sabotage being thrown at your humble music producers. They are being berated for literally squeezing the life out of music. I actually observed this phenomenon during the Intro to Ableton Live course that I took in February. Live is very popular among Electronic Dance Music (EDM) practitioners. In the course, you prepare and submit a track meeting certain criteria, and then evaluate the submissions of five other students taking the course.

I've never listened to this EDM before, so this was quite an ear opener for me; 80% of the tracks I evaluated were of some variant of EDM. How do you evaluate something for which you don't know the rules? And how do you encourage others when their work does not really suit your taste? But I did it. I even listened to and evaluated more than my share on the side. 

Anyway, many of the EDM-ites produced their tracks so that their sonic profiles looked like solid rectangles holding max volume from beginning to end. Here's an example from one of my peers:

Unlike Your Dreams by Lavric

Being brought up as more of an acoustic musician, I've come to appreciate how dynamics breathe life into most of the music I love and listen to. But with digital recording and mastering, the producer can precisely control and correct every little human "flaw" in a performance.

Apparently, some music industry experts have found that the purchasing masses want to listen to their music really loud. So these experts have coerced their producers to squeeze the dynamics out of the music using such tools as compressors and limiters, and make the recorded tracks as loud as possible without distorting. At least that's what some would have us believe. They call it "The Loudness War". (Google it; it's a thing!) The irony is that in moving from recording on tape to recording in digital space, producers now have a wider space to play in from the quietest sound we can hear (the noise floor) to the loudest we can bear. (One technical term for this is dynamic range.) However, the opponents of the Loudness War claim the producers excessively use compression to force all the quiet sounds to be elevated. Here's an example that tries to illustrate the issue


The problem is, when I listen to the examples of "overcompressed" music, I cannot hear the problem. The music sounds the same to me, with and without compression. In the example above I hear different EQ (high and low frequencies), but I don't hear the loudness or compression issues. It must be like one of those pictures popular in the 90s, where people will swear there's an animal in there, but you can't see it. Then when you finally do see it, you will never again not see it. Like the shark right here in the middle of this picture. Don't you see it?

Likewise, I can't hear compression (but I can see that shark!)

So here's my position on all of this. I'm not planning on getting my tracks played on the radio or making any hit charts. So I will use dynamics as part of the musical expression. Where the use of compression makes sense, I will use it, but I'm not going to try to compete in the Loudness War.

Does it seem to you that music these days seems to be artificially loud? Have you noticed the difference between the loudness of a typical classical track vs. contemporary music? Do you think this controversy is just a bunch of (ahem) noise? I'd love to know what you think.

 Until next time, go make some music!