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

[Kevin Gross]

There's a lot of criticism of this work for what they did not measure. I
was pointing out that one of the things that they did measure (macro
dynamics) clearly does not support the thesis that pop music is measurably
worse over the years.

On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 12:18 AM, Thomas Lund <thomas at lund.one> wrote:

> 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>
> 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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