THE LOUDNESS WAR
Analyzing the Loudness War and the cultural impact of the battlefields
Artists want to stand out, making their music as loud as possible. But do we even care? Or do we notice at all? Through this website we are showing what the Loudness War is all about, what it does, whether it even exists and what it means in our lives. Follow the story below to follow this journey.
Recorded music is all around us. With several buttons, we can reach almost every piece of recorded music in the world. The development of recorded music has always been intriguing to us. The recording technologies changed the perspective towards music drastically. Music was not necessarily live anymore. People suddenly were able to enjoy the great orchestras and bands from the comfort of their own living room.
With the commercialization of music, that grew along with recording technologies but really blew up from the 50s onwards, another tendency appeared to the surface. Suddenly the market had to be taken into account while writing and producing music. The recording as commodity was an immensely sellable product. Artists and producers were gradually starting to think more and more about the audience they were making the music for. Eventually these developments resulted in a competitiveness among artists. Artists would find anything that made them stand out from the rest. This did not only happen in popular music. An example of this is Miles Davis. When he touched upon the field of what we now call “Fusion Jazz”, some of his fans answered this with raised eyebrows. However, he did this because he saw records by Sly and the Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix hit off by the young people. His artistic motivation was reaching the audience he wanted to reach by standing out.
This is of course one of many examples of artists letting the audience influence their artistic process. However, with technology still developing, the methods change. One obvious change is the development of the studio as a creative space. At first, the studio was only a room with a microphone, where recordings could take place. But later on, the studio was extensively used in the creative process. During recording, there are tons of parameters that can be meddled with, besides the advantage that several recordings can overdub each other and different recordings can be combined for better versions of the piece of music that is being recorded. In short, the studio has a lot of artistic possibilities, which have thoroughly been explored throughout all music genres in the past 70 years.
One of the processes that knows a lot of mediation because of artistic exploration, is the process of mastering music. Mastering has often been described as “some sort of magic”, but it basically is a process of intensely listening to the music at stake and tweaking parameters to drive the song to perfection. These parameters include frequency distribution, compression, loudness and many more.
In this case, we will focus on this process of engineering. It's loudness that we are interested in. What does this parameter mean in the complex structure of mastering and why does it result in a war?
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