Tomorrow*, readers, is Dynamic Range Day!
… Ok, so it may not be as widely celebrated as St Paddy’s Day just two days ago, but Dynamic Range Day is significant to nearly everybody in the music industry, with music listeners high up on that list. You just don’t know it yet.
But what is dynamic range, I hear you ask.
Funnily enough, dynamic range relates to sound waves (imagine me writing about sound! Crazy.) It’s essentially the difference between the quiet parts of a song to the louder parts. For example, the majority of songs will have a louder chorus than its verse, as it’s only natural to add more instruments (or louder instruments) into the part of the song that sticks in people’s minds and sings along to.
Classical music pieces often have a high dynamic range, as it is often written into the music for the orchestra to play quietly or loudly. However in pop and rock songs, compression (a tool used by sound engineers used to reduce the dynamic range) is used in most songs, giving a more average volume level throughout the track. Think, for example, of the majority of Snow Patrol’s songs, where Gary Lightbody’s voice which can sometimes range from a mere whisper to singing at the top of his voice, yet every syllable can be heard over the drums and guitars: his voice has been compressed and the gain turned up in order for his vocals to remain at the forefront of the mix at all times. This is a good use of compression, when performed at the mixing stage of the record.
However, over recent years records have been released more emphasis on the term “loudness”. As the name suggests, this relates to the volume of the record, but not in a “put this in your CD player and your speakers will blow up” sense: rather, the loudness comes from the dynamic range side, where at the mastering stage of the record, the audio has been compressed (or squashed) and the gain has been turned up to the highest possible volume before distortion kicks in. As a result, instead of hearing the natural “punch” of the chorus, the verse and chorus are in fact the same volume, therefore losing that “punch”.
There are a number of reasons floating about as to why records are produced this way. Label execs have one priority in releasing a record: to make money from it. If you combine the music industry’s struggle to make any sort of money from records due to internet pirates with the explosion of bands from MySpace and Facebook, the profit margins are proving slimmer than ever. So, it follows that if your record is louder than those of your rivals, surely it would be the preferred choice, right?
Further, the advent of digital technology a la Pro Tools and Cubase gave sound engineers have the ability to manipulate sound however they see fit at the click of a button, a far cry from the days of recording and editing using reel to reel tapes. Unfortunately, it has come to the point where the art of mastering a record has transformed into simply making it as loud as possibl”. Mastering is more of a polishing process, where the audio is tweaked and fine-tuned before being released into the wild. Yes, it does involve increasing the volume of the record, but aren’t the quiet parts meant to be quiet?
Music fans have hit back, citing their displeasure at listening to loud records: last year, Metallica’s Death Magnetic was heavily criticised for its poor mastering, with fans petitioning for the album to be remixed and remastered by a different engineer. One fan review on Amazon claimed that, “when I should be banging my head in euphoria, I’m instead trying to keep my lunch down because I’m hearing more crackles and pops than I am actual guitar tones.”
With the release of the Metallica Guitar Hero game, songs from the album were remastered, resulting in fans expressing a preference for the video game version over the album cuts. Metallica are, after all, a heavy metal band – a genre which famously encourages loud, in-your-face stylings – so the act of petitioning for the album’s volume to be turned down makes an incredible statement about the nature of contemporary music.
This brings us back to Dynamic Range Day. The event is backed by turnmeup.org, an organisation campaigning to “give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records”. Participants are asked raise awareness of the issue by TYPING EVERYTHING THEY WRITE ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES IN BLOCK CAPITALS, LIKE SO. THIS ISN’T SIMPLY TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE ISSUE, BUT TO GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT LOUD RECORDS ARE DOING TO THE LISTENER’S EARS.
LIKE ME, ARE YOU THE TYPE OF PERSON THAT GETS IRRITATED BY POOR USE OF PUNCTUATION OR GRAMMAR OVER THE INTERNET AND TEXT MESSAGES (I KNOW SOME STEREOKILL WRITERS ARE ENGLISH STUDENTS!) SO WHEN YOU HAVE TO READ SOMETHING ENTIRELY IN BLOCK CAPITALS IT CAN BECOME FATIGUING AND IRRITATING TO YOUR EYES? OK, A TEXT MESSAGE IS ONLY A FEW LINES LONG, BUT LOOK HERE – I’VE WRITTEN A WHOLE PARAGRAPH USING ONLY BLOCK CAPITALS. IS IT ANNOYING YOU YET? CAN YOU IMAGINE I WROTE THE WHOLE ARTICLE LIKE THIS? WOULD YOU HAVE MADE IT TO READ THIS FAR OR WOULD YOU HAVE GIVEN UP BY NOW?
Okay, I’ll stop now (thank fuck; see me after class – Ed.) But try listening to an album for 10-15 minutes where every section of every song is of the exact same volume. You’ll find that it quickly becomes very fatiguing on the ears, and could actually cause physical damage in extreme cases. So, that’s what Dynamic Range Day is about: trying to make the music industry aware of the problem, in the hope that they might see the light and change their ways.
*20th March 2010
Articles our internet goblins think may interest you...
Jamie Hewitt is a musician and producer based in Dundee. 
Recent Comments