Thursday, June 6, 2013

I just noticed an article, "'Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War" by Emmanuel Deruty, in the Sept. 2011 SOS, http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm .

This article is very interesting - not sure what to make of it. It claims to prove that music is not getting less dynamic.

My AES paper on the topic, http://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar/ , found a noticeable decrease of "dynamic range" from 1985 to 2010 (from almost 13 dB to less than 8 dB), but this used the "TT Dynamic Range Meter", which actually measures something more like crest factor than dynamic range.

I agree that the term "Dynamic Range" is ill-defined and maybe not relevant here - a statistical measure would be more appropriate. It would be surprising to me if the "Loudness Range" (http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=16254) has not decreased - I'd be curious to hear what the original creators of the Loudness Range measure would say about this.

Clearly more work is needed to figure out how musical dynamics have changed and which measures are most relevant.

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