From Loudness Wars to Dynamic Range: A Return to Classical & Jazz

This post is a continuation of Part I Childhood Introduction to Classical Music

I’ll refer to genres like Pop, Rock, R&B etc, as Pop from here on out.

I find that a lot of the Pop music I previously liked and would listen to often just doesn’t tickle my ears anymore. In fact, some of it hurts my ears. There was this phenomena that started in the 80s and persisted though the 2000s and even today called the “loudness wars.” which is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity.

Loudness in this case can been seen easily on a spectrogram of an audio track. (Image examples found on the Wikipedia page linked above) The highs and lows will be so high as to get to the maximum on both ends and look like a large wall, or bar going across with minimal dips in range. When you listen to a track like this it feels just like a wall of sound smashing you in the face or rather your ears. Some people like that I guess, but I don’t. It’s painful to my ears, and my mind. If I keep the volume low enough so that the pressure waves - sound, aren’t physically hurting my ears, then I can easily tell that the music sounds terrible. Regardless of the volume, that loudness or bricking of the waveform is fatiguing to me.

What the loudness wars did was ruin a lot of music that might otherwise have been pretty good. One has to be careful when buying any music that is labeled “Remastered” because in some cases, but not all, the volume was simply boosted to extremes and little to nothing else was changed.

There is a thing called Dynamic Range. Dynamic range in music refers to the difference between the loudest and softest sounds that can be produced and heard in a recording. The loudness wars basically made all the sounds, the notes, in the music be as loud as possible the whole way through a track. Any parts that were softer were now much louder. Thus it became a constant stream of high powered sound coming at you with no break or relief.

I think this was partly responsible for my gravitating back to Classical and also incorporating Jazz too. These two genres typically have great dynamic range - very soft and quiet parts all the way up to louder parts. The difference in the loud parts here is that they don’t last a long time, let along for the whole track. I don’t find Classical or Jazz fatiguing to listen to.

Moving on from the loudness wars and how it differs with Classical Music, I’ve come back to what I initially loved about it when I first became acquainted with it from those Saturday evenings on the PBS station. The music has a penchant for moving me emotionally at times and I’ve come to appreciate just how relaxing I find it.

Moreover, I appreciate how a story or an emotion can be told through this music and without any words or lyrics. The listener gets to choose their own story to follow along with the music and they get to emote in their own way, not guided by someone else’s lyrics.

My favorite instruments to listen to are the violin and the piano. When listening to a concerto of either kind, I fall in love with each note played. The precision of each note is something I can hear and I imagine the player running their bow across the strings or the piano’s hammers striking the strings to produce such beautiful music.

A well-rehearsed symphony, or concerto is something to behold when you consider how many people, instruments and timing come into play. They are complex pieces of work that require a lot of practice to make them sound good. That's not to say that other genres of music don't require a lot of practice either. But the coordination of a whole orchestra, in my opinion, is another level up for practice and coordination.

I still sprinkle Pop music into my regular listening and occasionally explore new releases to see if I can find something new to tickle my ears. In the next post I'll explore why Classical music gets more time in my playlists.