#mastering (5 links)
- The Loudness Wars: Is Music's Noisy Arms Race Over? - Mike Barthel - Entertainment - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
I want graphs, dammit.
"There's a little-watched video on Maroon Five's YouTube channel which documents the torturous, tedious process of crafting an instantly forgettable mainstream radio hit. It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called Makes Me Wonder), and how it doesn't have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: "I'm sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly he proceeds to do."
- The Loudness War Analyzed « Music Machinery musicmachinery.com
I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music.
- Turn Me Up! | Bringing Dynamics Back To Music turnmeup.org
A non-profit music industry organization campaigning to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records.