the loudness war
i’ve been reading a lot today about a subject that interests me quite a bit: loudness. i’ve found a few great articles online from a variety of sources that talk about the loudness war. for those unfamiliar with that term, the loudness war describes a modern trend in which producers and record company folk push for recordings to be louder. i won’t go into details about why someone would do this – there are plenty of great articles out there with more information than i care to provide.
i’m here to talk about the SWLSFB albums in the context of loudness. this article presents technical analysis of loudness in music via real-world examples. it also ranks artists based on the average dynamic range found in their music. for those un-interested in reading it, something called venetian snares has the most loudness (-1.25 dB) while my amigo brian eno has the least (-17.52 dB). the author here also shows the tools used to compute these statistics and i have used them to perform similar analysis on cat sounds and tabby road. i also intend to perform analysis on the in-progress mixes for sticky whiskers which, i hope, will help make this the best sounding record we’ve ever done
but first, let’s see how the other albums measure up….
Cat Sounds
| track | title | average loudness (dB) |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | (The) Aftermath (of You) | -17.3046297316 |
| 02 | Victim of Todd | -17.7739403509 |
| 03 | Spiral_Desecration Blvd. | -24.4761250462 |
| 04 | The Are No Others | -22.4311741176 |
| 05 | Lights! Camera! AWESOME! | -12.2994846819 |
| 06 | Grey Cat Strut | -17.1805162413 |
| 07 | Dan _heart_s Synthia | -17.5924688372 |
| 08 | Electro-War Ballad in Plain D | -17.0085412399 |
| 09 | Loading | -19.5191482966 |
| 10 | Aftermath (reprise) | -15.6413624535 |
as you can see, these songs are all pretty quiet with only two tracks louder than eno’s average! now, this doesn’t indicate the quality of the mix, but i like to believe that each record gets better so let’s see how tabby road stacks up ….
Tabby Road
| track | title | average loudness (dB) |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | women in airports | -18.4648934681 |
| 02 | hey baby (that’s the way the way that it is) | -17.5728318264 |
| 03 | crutchtronic | -18.4483134944 |
| 04 | this joke is over | -18.0072872189 |
| 05 | fare thee well (see you later) | -20.3179311044 |
| 06 | women in films | -13.9631104263 |
| 07 | babe you’re mine | -22.6107139656 |
| 08 | lucifer of form | -11.8420048243 |
| 09 | hello it’s me again | -24.2760979284 |
| 10 | somewhere to be | -14.0745633423 |
as you can see, this record is in a similar boat – we’ve got three tracks now that are louder than eno, though they are louder than the two loudest from cat sounds
so, what have we learned from this? well, probably nothing your ears have already told you: these records are pretty quiet. perhaps i should consider myself fortunate that i’m not part of the loudness problem. however, we need to inspect the dynamic range of the songs as well to get the full picture. expect an update to that effect soon!