Status Quo - The World
What, in detail, does it mean for musical culture in general and the reception of this music that there are these frictions between audial quality and the desire to stand out?
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Here we will discuss the inherent difficulties between the will to be unique and the artistic process, further on we will talk about the concessions made on this behalf and we will finish off with a prediction of the future of The Loudness War.
In general, artistic processes are seen as a free practice. The artist chooses her/his own directions, improvises on the spot and lets the mind explore their own field. In think every artist differs in process, but that a lot of their work is initiated by an internal drive, an idealist view on the world and the object they are working on. Is it thinkable that this process is in no way influenced from the outside in? I think it’s not. I believe that any process artists go through and actually we all go through as human-beings are formed by our experiences. We are born as tabula rasa and form our worldviews around that.
The problematic thing of the loudness war is that the balance between this artistic process and the influences from outside is skewed. In cases like Metallica and I think even in the Ed Sheeran example, the tendency to stand out, to be different than everyone else by being loud, is extremely overdone. I can understand the urge to keep the audience in mind while creating. But artistic quality is always more important than standing out.
A song that is mastered to be loud, is not of artistic high quality. The digital distortion and extremely small dynamic range that are the result of this process should in no way be used to ‘enhance’ the quality of the song.
Conducting extreme audio processing in the mastering process will not necessarily benefit the song. All audio processing interferes with audio quality. A big part of artistic quality is this audio quality.
I think a lot of popular music contains a lot of artistic quality. Also, especially in this genre and way of music production, the line between this quality and getting lost in the process is a fine one. Therefore it is very important that information like this is shared with the world
What's next?
The future of the Loudness War is hard to predict. "There will always be something of a Loudness War", according to Jeffrey de Gans. There will always be controverses within musical production, mastering and artistic expression in general. People will always think there are both good and bad choices.
I hope this piece of information is able to guide artists, engineers and music listeners in making, listening and enjoying (the proces of making) music.