<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi Kevin,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">A typical metric for MID is peak-to-loudness ratio. A typical metric for MAD is Loudness Range.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">cheers,</div><div class="">Thomas</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 18/02/2017, at 23.46, Kevin Gross <<a href="mailto:kevin.gross@comcast.net" class="">kevin.gross@comcast.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">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."<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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 <i class="">predicted </i>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.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 2:44 AM, Grimm | Eelco <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:eelco@grimmaudio.com" target="_blank" class="">eelco@grimmaudio.com</a>></span> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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...<br class="">
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<a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" class="">http://www.nature.com/<wbr class="">articles/srep00521</a><br class="">
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All the best,<br class="">
Eelco<br class="">
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