[MLA] ***SPAM*** Re: The Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

[Thomas Lund]

Hi Kevin,

It has been documented for ages that macrodynamics (MAD) in pop music isn’t changing much, but microdynamics (MID) certainly has been going down. How could the author be ignorant of such a fundamental distinction, which has been the fulcrum of many AES panels, papers and Ortner’s thesis?

A typical metric for MID is peak-to-loudness ratio. A typical metric for MAD is Loudness Range.

cheers,
Thomas


> On 18/02/2017, at 23.46, Kevin Gross <kevin.gross at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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 <http://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521>
> 
> All the best,
> Eelco
> _______________________________________________
> MLA mailing list
> MLA at grimmaudio.nl <mailto:MLA at grimmaudio.nl>
> http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl <http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl>
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MLA mailing list
> MLA at grimmaudio.nl
> http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://grimmaudio.nl/pipermail/mla_grimmaudio.nl/attachments/20170219/699cdaae/attachment.html>