Shooting down thick sound

[imomus]

"An awful lot of recent music, much of which I adore, sounds horrible," says Nick Southall in a great article for Stylus Magazine. It sounds horrible because, in a sort of audio arms race, record labels and bands clip and boost and compress their sound until it's thicker and thicker, louder and louder, hotter and hotter. It happens during recording, and it happens during mixing, and it happens during mastering. It happens because bands want to sound louder than the last CD you played and louder than the record next to them on the radio. Or at least as loud. Without you touching the dial. But as a result, people like Nick, who want "to hear everything possible, every detail in every song, soak it in and lose myself in it" are utterly frustrated. What you gain in sheer volume you lose in dynamics.



I get more and more interested in quiet recordings -- the kind that, when you open them up in audio software, don't look like a major earthquake just knocked the line off the edges of the chart. Of course, quiet recordings are the hardest to make. Last night I was trying to record the trumpeting coo of my rabbit's mating sounds as it dances around my feet (he's a foot fetishist, don't ask). The soft honk seems clear enough to the naked ear, but the recording turned out muddy, all mixed up with ambient sounds, impacts and motor noise. Later I was watching Peter Greenaway's film about John Cage (the Four American Composers series is up on ubu.com in its entirety, brilliant stuff). The film is full of quiet sounds and loud ones -- all the delights of dynamics, in other words. It also quotes Cage's brilliant put-down from "Indeterminacy":

"It isn’t useful, music isn’t, unless it develops our powers of audition. But most musicians can’t hear a single sound, they listen only to the relationship between two or more sounds. Music for them has nothing to do with their powers of audition, but only to do with their powers of observing relationships. In order to do this, they have to ignore all the crying babies, fire engines, telephone bells, coughs, that happen to occur during their auditions. Actually, if you run into people who are really interested in hearing sounds, you’re apt to find them fascinated by the quiet ones. “Did you hear that?” they will say."

I was very tempted to say "Did you hear that?" to fellow musician Jason Forrest the other day. We were on the U8 line, coming back from lunch. Jason was going to meet Jamie Lidell, who was going to lend him some microphones. (Jason has somehow recorded everything up to now without microphones, in other words without "audition", without giving his computer ears.) The train was making a most extraordinary noise -- something was stuck to one of the wheels, I think, something which made a combination of a whoop, a whistle and a bubble as it turned. It wasn't very loud above the track noise, but I wanted to see if Jason had heard it. I couldn't find the right moment to interrupt our conversation, though, and then Jason's stop came. Perhaps he heard it as the train rolled out of the station. I hope so. Maybe he got his mics, and ended up recording it the way Cornelius recorded his dot matrix printer for his last album (it's one of the best tracks).

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But all too often musicians are not just unobservant, they're deaf. They're so used to playing so loud that they don't hear The Elephant in the Room -- or the mouse under its foot. This Children of Men clip spells out the dangers of tinnitus in rather dramatic fashion, but do we really need to slam a black bag over people's heads and send them off to reprogramming camps to get this message through? Aren't articles like this Wired News one on How to prevent hearing loss enough?

Someone just sent me a link to a Slate article entitled JTunes: the insanely great music Apple won't let you hear. It's about how there's all this great Japanese music out there that you can't buy because of Apple's local restrictions. Unfortunately writer Paul Collins seems to think that "great music" equals thickly-recorded, loudly-mastered crap that almost sounds like American bands. And so he links to Straightener's Killer Tune -- a piece of ultra-derivative copy-by-numbers elephant dung strung halfway between Green Day and Nirvana, accompanied by a video in which every move the band makes seems to have been mapped from someone else. This kind of music is way too available these days. And, in every sense, this sound is way too thick.

I've just ordered a new iMac and was reading reviews of Logic Express, which I decided to include. Great though the software probably is, I really feel there's almost nothing you can do with it that would match the Greenaway film of John Cage's 70th birthday celebrations at the Almeida Theatre -- the radical social message of all those performers with their Fluxus radios, the inherent dramatic interest of that situation, the conceptual elegance of the man who set it up, and the inherent interest of the sounds themselves. This software is part of the problem, not the solution. It's for people who, in a sense, can't really hear. What would John Cage have done with Logic? Thrown it away, probably.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Of course, some might say that Cornelius' "Toner" track is as derivative of Paul Panhuysen's "Engines in Power and Love" -- an album made with dot matrix printers as the only instrument -- as Straightener's "Killer Tune" is derivative of Green Day. But I'm going to pass over that parallel. Even if they were similar cases, one music would still be thicker than the other.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Someone just sent me a link

That someone was me!

I do all my music mixing in final cut. Sucks to all the rest.

[(Anonymous)]

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

I thought you might find this interesting. People gathering and distributing "non-musical" sounds.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This is also good: A search engine for sounds (http://www.findsounds.com/).

[johnnybrolly.livejournal.com]

Bob Dylan: "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5277574.stm)
It does rather seem that the trend is to compensate for the lack of dynamic range in digital music (particularly MP3s) by filling in all of the blanks with squiggles and effects.

What's interesting is if you take an older (probably analogue) recording that was produced with vinyl in mind, and a newer recording meant for the age of MP3, and play them both on vinyl and MP3. No prizes for guessing that the older recording will sound quieter than the new when compared on digital format. The older recording will also lose a lot of its dynamic range. However, the interesting thing is when you compare on vinyl format - a fully digital recording, with all the bells and whistles, will often sound utterly flat compared with an older recording.

I think my point is that today's technology for compressing music isn't up to the standards that geeky audiophiles from the 70s used to bang on about. Mind you, geeky audiophiles in the 70s were reknowned for their love of Dark Side of the Moon and were probably been horrified when punk came along.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Given Dylan's dodgy track record on quality studio productions, his almost "fear of the studio", he may not be the best judge of fidelity.
Perhaps he was a true sonic puritan. One can observe the care with which he uses a microphone in the early, pre 1965 live performances, where it appears he was a master of his ambience.

[thehakujin.livejournal.com]

Didn't Cage use computers towards to end? I'm sure of it.

I've made several digital recordings where the wave form was one solid block. Just to say I did I guess. Then I found some old tape recordings where the sound is buried in hiss. At first I tired to get rid of it, but it can be kind of beautiful. You have to turn the speakers way up to hear the song at all and the hiss just fills the room like fog.

I think there's too many options to "fix" music any more, but that's another topic. I tend to be a proponent of loud, but loud means nothing without quiet, you are right.

And Straightener...jesus. How do you rip off other wholly derivative bands? Screw Apple anyway, there's nothing stopping people from buying Japanese CDs, there's a million site in English for that now.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

The itunes store is a DRM'd piece of shit anyway. I'm hoping it will still go the way of the Dodo as high-quality non-DRM'd mp3 vending sites like Warp Records' Bleep (http://www.bleep.com) gain more of a profile, but since part of the point of DRM is technologically-enforced brand loyalty, people are going to be hesitant to abandon the itunes store altogether.

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

"all too often musicians are not just unobservant, they're deaf ... This Children of Men clip spells out the dangers of tinnitus in rather dramatic fashion, but do we really need to slam a black bag over people's heads and send them off to reprogramming camps to get this message through?"

But that's not the problem, exactly. It's not usually the fact that they are deaf, it's that they are intentionally filtering out the sounds around them. I have a good deal of hearing damage from seeing hundreds of live concerts a year when I was young, but I tend to hear -- and often focus on -- sounds that most people would ignore.

"The soft honk seems clear enough to the naked ear, but the recording turned out muddy..."

Sounds like you'd need to pull out all the stops (http://www1.epinions.com/content_2034933892) to record a sound like that.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"I have a good deal of hearing damage from seeing hundreds of live concerts a year when I was young, but I tend to hear -- and often focus on -- sounds that most people would ignore."

That´s the difference between listening and listening, I suppose. But then we grow up with so much background noise that a lot of people need it in music too.

[yetchor.livejournal.com]

The 27 sounds manufactured from a kitchen reminds me of György Pálfi's film Hukkle (http://www.hukkle.hu/) (hiccup). Have you seen it? Filmed entirely from a micro perspective and without dialogue, any semblance of a story is revealed through the sounds emitted from actions - like a knife on a chopping board, doors shutting and (of course) hiccups. If ever there is a conversation, it is muffled, turned down and assimilated into the background. Recommended!

[zazie-metro.livejournal.com]

P.S.: says here (http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_031126palfi.html) that he wanted to make "a musical without music".

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

For the past week or so I've been using a 68k mac emulator on OS X to make music with Super Studio Session, this program from the late 80s/early 90s. The included sound samples are all 8 bit and at 22KHz. While the sounds, in theory, aren't particularly interesting, the low resolution of said sounds create these amazing peripheral artifacts of noise that add so much depth to an overall recording(which is also kind of my reason for liking the sounds and textures of chiptunes). They have much more personality than the professionally EQed, 24-bit digital sounds from GarageBand. At the same time, the overlapping digital hiss sometimes becomes so overwhelming that it also forces one to add a lot more space to a composition.

[19091977.livejournal.com]

It's just like what happens with digital effects in movies these days or movies that are completely digital, there isn't much space or contrast. It's just millions of things on the screen at once doing stuff & every color imaginable & all this. I've noticed the lack of space in music alot lately as well... also, unprocessed vocals!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"unprocessed vocals!"

Yes! I´ve talked about this with my singing teacher before. It really gets to me, as well, as I can´t stop hearing the effect louder than the actual voice.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I have removed the "natural bass" of most instruments on the songs for my new album. There is close to no "punch"/"power" in the songs anymore. Sounds fun?

[(Anonymous)]

add some 808s.

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Hmm I would have taken you for an Ableton Live type of guy. I love using the program and it can become very abstract to work with in a good way. I made that Bonsai Tree remix in Live. Download the demo when you get your mac to check it out. :)

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

I've been using Logic for one year (I had tried Digital Performer before, and half a dozen PC programs in tandem before that) and am finally beginning to feel familiar with it, but am unable to resist the temptation to use all of the magical plugins. This is lots of fun on the goofy sequenced music that Paul and I write as Zelda and the Unibrows but gets in the way of truth for anything attempting to capture a moment.

Recently I recorded a friend's quiet, tiny guitar piece and found that I didn't need to apply any processing at all to it other than ensuring decent recording levels. Also the entire process from start to finish took such a short time; with all of the magic plugins I'm used to going back and tweaking for hours or days or months.

But if one can develop a deliberate attitude about working with such digital audio workstations, simplicity and dynamics can be had just as surely as with with older techniques, but for me at least, allowing that simplicity has required time first burrowing through the loud and complex.

Last night I had a dream that Henryk Mikolaj Górecki was in my house angrily rummaging through my possessions and criticizing my music.

[(Anonymous)]

You're lucky, if it had been Witold Lutoslawski things could have got reeeal nasty...
Thomas S.

[(Anonymous)]

I particularly like your quote from Cage on audition.
Actually listening to music- really listening and not just hearing it as an ambient accompaniment to other activity- is an acquired skill in itself.
Perhaps noticing the beauty or even the uniqueness of sounds themselves -be they Whimsy's frogs or your train wheels- is taking this capability a stage further.
Thomas S.

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

Here are some cicadas, neighborhood and traffic sounds from my back yard recorded a few years back:

August Yard Sounds (http://www.unibrows.com/audio/augustyardsounds.mp3)

(Some drum overhead mics were used here, which themselves add a noise floor. This recording is still not totally honest, I moved the mics halfway through and have cross-faded that away.)

[(Anonymous)]

I like that, it brings back memories of a summer I spent in Toronto, sounds wonderfully exotic across the distance from here to there..
Thomas S.

thick digital everything, flat tipped and square bricked

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, computers do alot less good than bad with sound, generally and most always. It is in my compulsively honed personal opinion that all computers should be avoided in the process of creation, always, up to the damned innevitable point of transfer into digital media (cd, dvd, etc). All computers suck, chop and compress; loud is better when you want to warn something about something else...the apple corporation have made shitty mp3s the standard and we all are left with loud, non-sexy, non-voluptous sound; left now with lots of pseudo-psych releases with nothing psychedelic about it...straight treble and straight bass are hardly colorful and expressive in differring shape or size. Tape decks are cheap and sound great, albeit a bit hissy but who really carees. I'm eagerly awaiting the re-introduction of wire recorders...no footnote on wire recorders included, but fortunately you're reading this on the lazy man's dictionary.
love,
John Flesh

Re: thick digital everything, flat tipped and square bricked

[gwazda.livejournal.com]

"All computers suck, chop and compress"

The absurd loudness of today's digital recordings is all USER ERROR. The reason many recording types like the sound of analog tape is actually because it has a "natural compression", that is, when you hit it really hard, it limits the volume of the sound in a pleasing way. If what you want is clean, uncompressed audio, high quality digital PCM audio is going to give better results in most cases, particularly at low decibles, because of the decreased noise floor.
-chester

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

It almost seems as if each artist wants the listener to think that the world consists solely of the artist and the listener and the world is also somehow become a vacuum of sound.


I listen to a lot of mp3s because I like to have a soundtrack. I am not sure what I would or should listen to if I wanted to drown in good sound. Maybe my uncle's reel-to-reel system from 1973 would be a better bet?

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

John Cage bores the tits off me.

Juana Molina

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

She describes here the way she mixes live her music and how is she inspired by all the sound around. I remembered your post when I heard her talking about the elevator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_3ooACrLQ4&eurl=

Re: Juana Molina

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, great little film! She's so good...

[nimbus9.livejournal.com]

This discussion reminds me of this classic thread: http://www.recording.org/ftopic-30855-days0-orderasc-0.html

[(Anonymous)]

wow, reading this makes me feel so bad: my soundfiles are nothing but big thick square parallelepipeds. some heavily digitally compressed music is so unsanely beautiful these days, i can't help the attraction. good job for the counter movement, though. a lot of dance music i'm listening to these days (straight disco and italo disco stuff from the end of the 70s) is hardly compressed, there's a lot to learn from there too.

(odot)

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> my soundfiles are nothing but big thick square parallelepipeds
Don't feel bad! Loud mastering volume is great!

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

i guess the problem is that it is all relative. definately there seems to be a move away from 70's style hi-fi, where it is the *speakers* that are loud, towards peple not caring what they play their music back on (laptop speakers, ipod earplugs, etc). Even compared to 90s style rave/dj aesthetics - i haven't heard anyone talking about 40,000 watt rigs for years.

a good case towards real dynamics would be Erstwhile style electro-acoustic improv (i remember a while ago on your links page there was a link to the label), which when you look at the waveforms are all totally uncompressed looking, yet still manage to annoy people by being "too loud", which is really just a response to the sudden appearence of loudness, compared to horrible constant levels.

I've been using Logic for years, and i don't think overloudness is a foregone conclusion, it's easy enough to open a compresion plug-in & do something wacky, but if you avoid doing this you'll be fine.

my john cage prepared piano cd's *are* comparatively quiet, now you mention it.

[(Anonymous)]

PS: Hukkle is GREAT

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

The loudness war is a downer, but I can't help but think that jettisoning digital technology entirely is missing the point. There are plenty of analog recordings that suffer from the same problem (see most vinyl mastered by major labels after 1994 or so). The reason modern recordings sound like crap is that they are run through compressors that amplify every frequency to the same flat level -- usually well above the decibel sensitivity of the media it's intended for. That's why you get the "brick" waveforms. It makes them sound "clear" and "audible" on crappy speakers and especially when blasted over store stereos or on television, but horrible when listened to on hifi equipment. Guess what format most music is intended for, these days...

It's relatively easy to get a "warm" sound from digital recording gear, if you pay attention to how sound actually works and don't just keep pushing up the faders. People are just way too fond of "maximizing" the entire waveform.

This topic has been beat to death on Usenet and amongst hifi geeks for a few years now. There are highly technical explanations on the standard websites (several forums exist solely to discuss the phenomenon) that explain the difference between a Bernie Grundman mastered album from the '80s and a ProTools mastered album from the '00s.

A lot of it stems from labels cutting corners by letting artists and their producers master their own albums on their computers. Bernie Grundman (and the handful of other real mastering engineers that are still around) charge quite a lot of money.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Dynamic range is mere rockism.

For the last couple of years, I've worked on the principle that the most important thing in my music should be a loud mastering volume.

Ironically, my wife immediately skips my tracks when they come up randomly on her mp3 player, because "they're too loud". Bummer.

[dutch-schulz.livejournal.com]

The fan howl is the scourge of most computer users who haven't lost hearing yet, including (a few) modern musicians. Someone has to make a concept recording out of that abominable sound alone! Maybe turn it into something cute, like rabbit's mating call.
Sorry to say, Nick, but I'm afraid that the iMac could provide a lot of inspiration for that right in the face. Mine certainly does.

Logic?

[(Anonymous)]

I thought Logic Express was yesterdays news compared to Pro Tools (even Pro Tools LE)?

Any reason for choosing Logic over Pro Tools?

Re: Logic?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I started with Notator -- that was my first music sequencer, and I liked it. Logic is the direct descendent of Notator. Cornelius uses Logic, and Logic is integrated with Garageband, which I largely recorded Ocky Milk with. It's also cheaper than even Pro Tools LE. And you can order it as you order the computer. Still, I'd rather, as I say, clang on pipes in a cathedral or something.