About “good sound” and “good sound standard” Part 2
Volume bias
Humans tend to hear “good sound” when sound is loud.
For example, the sound of a live performance sounds great, doesn’t it?
Of course, there will be good performances and productions. However, simple loudness is also involved.
It can be said that this bias is also the cause of the “sound pressure war *”.
* What is sound pressure warfare?
Loudness War-Wikipedia
ja.wikipedia.org
There is a device called Maximizer that squashes the “dynamics (volume difference in a song)” and increases the “sound pressure (sense of volume of the whole song)”.
“Dynamics” is a necessary element for delicate musical expression.
However, it is difficult for the average listener (or even a musician?) To see the difference.
On the other hand, if you increase the sound pressure, it sounds easy to understand and eye-catching (= does it lead to sales?). So since
Maximizer was developed, the “sound pressure” of various songs has increased.
As a result, the streets were flooded with songs that lost their dynamics in exchange for sound pressure.
The word that ridiculed this trend is “Sound Pressure War (Loudness War)”.
Analysis of differences between songs from Showa VS Heisei Hit [Data analysis with Spotify API and Python]
I compared and analyzed the data of the songs included in the official Spotify playlists “Showa Pops” and “Heisei Pop History”! !! What’s the difference between Showa and Heisei’s hit songs? ??
khufrudamonotes.com
2021.02.26
However, in recent years on Youtube and Spotify, as an important delivery platform for loudness normalization (system to lower the sound source that was too high a sound pressure VOLUME forcibly) has been introduced.
↑ By the way, you can check how much the volume of the sound source uploaded to YouTube is controlled from “Detailed statistics” in the menu that appears by right clicking on the playback screen.
You can see that this song is automatically reduced to 64% of the original data.
(When I mixed this sound source, it was a transitional period where loudness normalization was extended, so I put it on a sound pressure level, but I think now was not a good decision.)
Therefore, it can be said that it makes no sense to increase the sound pressure for people now.
In fact, the loudness normalization gives the impression that the overall sound pressure war is a bit more subdued than it was at one point.
However, in the main music scene, there are still many songs set to high SPL.
(It seems to be due to simple ignorance or, in the case of Japan, the CD business is still half-way.)
