[MLA] The Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

[Kevin Gross]

I found this part interesting, "...although music recordings become louder,
their absolute dynamic variability has been conserved, understanding
dynamic variability as the range between higher and lower loudness passages
of a recording. However, and perhaps most importantly, one should notice
that digital media cannot output signals over 0 dBFS, which severely
restricts the possibilities for maintaining the dynamic variability if the
median continues to grow."

Over the period studied, loudness came up but "the absolute difference
between the first and third quartiles of x remains constant around 9.5 dB."
I would suggest that the increase in loudness is because improved digital
processing allows it. In the first paragraph I quoted, the authors *predicted
*a future loss of dynamic range due to the 0 dBFS limit. But what appears
to have happened instead in the 10 years since the most recent data in the
study is that as we hit that 0 dBFS limit and fundamental limits of
dynamics processing, the intensity of the loudness war has abated leaving
us with the constant 9.5 dB loudness variability.

On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 2:44 AM, Grimm | Eelco <eelco at grimmaudio.com> wrote:

> I found this interesting article in Nature about the Evolution of
> Contemporary Western Popular Music. Even when skipping the hard core
> statistics, it offers interesting insights...
>
> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521
>
> All the best,
> Eelco
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>
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