So there is a war, how does it sound?
The essence of this case study is in the perception of the symptoms of the Loudness War. Are the tiny dynamic ranges audible, despite loudness normalization? What does it mean for music to be loud, to clip or to have small dynamic ranges?
As the earlier example of Metallica showed, limiting and compressing a song to its extremes results in a non-enjoyable result, however, audible clipping is not that common. All clipping is also proven to be very fatiguing for our brains. Listening to a lot of songs with clipping sounds is physically exhausting. However, usually this goes by unnoticed.
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Besides the obvious downsides to small dynamic ranges and boosted signals, these phenomena still happen today. On this page we will discuss the loudness war as it is going on today.
Popular music today still uses the same drive to stand out in the artistic process. Mastering engineers are still asked to make songs louder. Luckily, Jeffrey de Gans, a mastering engineer I had a good conversation with, tells he is always searching for the perfect level of loudness to match the song. He describes that his way of mastering is not about numbers or exact measurements, but he sees importance in the feel of the music and how he can elevate that feeling within the song. This is an important characteristic of a mastering engineer. Due to Jeffrey’s experience, artists trust his judgement. He knows what is best for any song.
However, there is still a lot of debate among mastering engineers. Besides you see 2 examples of songs. Billie Eilish with 'you should see me in a crown' and Olivia Rodrigo with 'driver’s license'.
Try to listen attentively to both songs.
Both of these songs are American and have more than 500 million streams. Both songs have a relatively soft, small intro. The choruses of both songs are higher in density, intensity and (perceptional) loudness. I add the word 'perceptional' because there is something going on with these songs.
If you listen attentively to the Billie Eilish song, you hear a great difference in the loudness of her voice and the instrumentation between intro, verse and chorus. The bigger dynamic range is hearable. If we compare it to Olivia Rodrigo, we hear that her voice is pretty much at the same volume throughout the entire song. She uses sighing sounds and instrumentation to suggest lower loudness. However, the dynamic range of this song is way smaller. In my vision, those smaller dynamic ranges result in more interesting songs in the end.
driver's license
you should see me in a crown
The images above show a slightly reformed image of the reality.
First thing to note is that both songs differ in length, therefore the x-axis is not synchronised between the images.
Also, both songs clip in various parts of the song. You can see this by the flat ends of the waveform at the end of the y-axis. However, i think this is a stylistic choice if we look at the Billie Eilish song, the chorus sounds very compact and slightly distorted, this fits the song well.
What we can see is that the verse of 'you should see me in a crown' (from 1 minute on) has more peaks and lows (Dynamic Range) than the verse of driver's license (from 1 minute 30). Also the last chorus of driver's license has a lot thicker waveform, this is partly due to x-axis synchronisation, but also because the lower elements in the mix are raised by compression and limiting.
Here are some more examples of popular songs from the last years
The small dynamic ranges in these songs are shown by the circles. As we can see both 'Circles' by Post Malone and 'Shivers' by Ed Sheeran have a lot of regions with very small dynamic ranges. The audio signal is very dense. 'INDUSTRY BABY' by Lil Nas X, featuring Jack Harlow has a surprisingly big dynamic range. The song sounds really compact and loud. This is a way in which the dynamic range is perfectly balanced to give the music what it needs.
I think the Loudness War and the smaller dynamic ranges result in less enjoyable productions. I think the dynamic within a song can really tell a story, by compressing and limiting the signal, this entire parameter is gone. I don't wanna say that all good music is not compressed or limited, i just have a preference.