[PD-ot] Loudness

[Marc Lavallée]

Le 26 Mai 2006 01:41, Chris McCormick a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> I found this article interesting; especially for people who work
> entirely in the digital domain from (for example) Pd through to ogg
> vorbis/mp3.
>
> http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_big_squeeze/

It doesn't matter if the work is produced in the digital domain (sound is 
analog anyway). The problem is that many of us can't deal with silence, 
because we live in and contributes to our noisy environments, and because 
we were raised to believe that loudness = musical emotion like ketchup = 
good taste. Loudness is not really the problem, we all have a "0" and a 
"11" on our amplifiers. The "sidebar" in the article is missing the point; 
if we normalize most 60's hits to 0dB , they will look the same as recent 
chart-toppers, beacuse they were designed to be played on AM car radios 
while eating junk food.

When some "audio artists" discovers that silence is also important, they 
often overreact and produce inaudible and meaningless "music" as a way to 
sound "artsy" (different from the top 40). But the human brain is not 
better wired to hunt for sound than to avoid noise. Music is somewhere in 
between, where there's meaninful dynamics (5.5)...

Here's an example of extreme non-musical stupidity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3614180.stm

> Best,
>
> Chris.
>
> -------------------
> chris at mccormick.cx
> http://mccormick.cx
>
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-- 
Marc

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