Oh ohm on the range, and cold cuts

1. In the December Rolling Stone there was a long article addressing the issue of sound compression techniques in music production.

Essentially techniques were employed to reduce the differences within the music and maintain fairly high volume throughout, or what our ears interpret as such, and though this was aimed at mainstream music, it has become endemic. It has resulted in remastered versions of classics (remastering used to mean being actually engineered more carefully) being worse than old. The article expresses it much better…

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn’t volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It’s the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners’ attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums “have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.”

In 2004, Jeff Buckley’s mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son’s recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. “We were hearing instruments you’ve never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked,” she remembers. “It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio.”

To Guibert’s disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. “You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room,” she says of the new release. “Compression smudges things together.”

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys’ debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. “You lose the power of the chorus, because it’s not louder than the verses,” Bendeth says. “You lose emotion.”

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn’t last. “The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness,” Levitin says. “If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous.” After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

Much of the article refers to problems with limited ranges on mp3 players and how this is training a generation to accept an inferior product. I don’t use the things and though I rarely hook up the old vinyl decoder, I listen to either radio or my cd player. I do play music on my computer but the speakers are pretty basic so I don’t do that unless at work with headphones.

I’m of two minds about the issue.

Neil Young was yammering about this when cds first came out and I initially thought he was a nut. However, the vinyl on average does seem to have that warmth he talks about, the warmth that can only come from variability in the signal. It mimics the way we receive all our other sounds. Digital music, though it often sounds good enough to me, is a poor representation of natural sounds.

I think however that another part of the problem which is only alluded to in one of the quotes from industry types is that variability is approached as an error. I think that it is these errors that make music sound good, and one sound different from another. A lot of music sounds a lot the same these days, and though part of it is an even stronger commercial pressure to repeat success, another part is the removal of idiosyncracies.

I love Beatles records despite the fact that and partly because they are flawed from beginning to end. They are masterpieces in every way but there are all sorts of uncontrollable things going on in the process; listen and you hear handclapping in and out of time, voices mostly on but sometimes not, little comments made, notes wandering off into the foul zone, messiness, anarchy. Or for example, one cd that never strays too far from my player -Exile on Main Street. Things that these days would be edited out.

I do however have a reason why this may not matter terribly. Though as much as the next person I can appreciate the sheer beauty of a recording, I am even more drawn to a good song. A great song works even if you hear it through a shitty radio. I have a couple of Blur cds that fit this category….uneven sound quality, and songs all over the map and the only thing that ties them together is the band, and the range is frightening only because it has become so rare.

2. Deputy Dog had a guest poster writing about bizarre recordings and the following intrigued me the most. Always loved mentions of the ice hotels. (There are other types of odd music production in the DD post).

From the producers of this tundral art form, All Ice Records:
The instruments are made from top quality ice. It must be free of any air bubbles. The instruments are carved using saws and knives. So far these instruments have been created and recorded: Iceofon, Ice Harp, Ice Horn, Ice trumpet, Ice percussion, Ice bass drum carved from one block of ice. In addition, all stands, supports and tables are also made from ice. Only the bass drum pedal, fish line for suspension, and the strings on the Ice Harp are made from materials other than pure frozen water.