Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Who would ever have thought that the Verizon Buddy Holly’s debut would also introduce the phrase that best articulates the direction industry music heads towards today—into the red, the 11 on the volume knob of your Fender amp, in so few words, LOUD!!!

And I’m not talking Van Halen loud, though they no doubt polished a few eardrums in their time. No, this loud applies to artists from Nelly Furtado to Red Hot Chili Peppers. The artist no longer determines the loudness variable, the consumer (you) does, perhaps not on purpose, but when your tunes play through small computer speakers, what’s soft will play inaudible unless sound engineers increase the volume to such a degree that the soft is loud. And when what’s soft is loud, what’s loud is loud enough to fall the walls of Jericho.

“So What?” you say, “If the engineers crank up the volume, I’ll just crank it down. It’s still the same music, right?”

Wrong.

The engineers don’t turn the volume knob up per se, instead, they apply what’s called dynamic range compression “which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in song … relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power, and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue[1].

Punk rock is great, but when most everything on the market today blasts with such breathless, near-static intensity, the nuance that shaped the sounds of greats like Billie Holiday, and Jeff Buckley never escapes the recording studio.

Andy Warhol and his pop culture art operate at this volume—the colors loud and bright; the contrast, not the dynamic shades and gradations employed by the great artists before him, but a chromatic contrast—electric pink against antifreeze blue. These colors are chemical colors, amplified tones from reality, just as today’s music plays amplified, the sounds of the studio compressed into an eardrum assault.

I’m a huge fan of Warhol, but I like Cézanne too, and Rodin, and countless other artists who whisper and whine their colors, and who, if compressed to Warhol’s volume would doubtless shudder and break.

The trouble is that we, the children of the digital age, alienated from the audiophilia by the prohibitive cost of CDs and the convenience of MP3’s, can’t well tell (or at least don’t much care about) the difference between the compressed quality of MP3’s and the richer dynamic tones of CD’s and LP’s. Pity.

For more on “the loudness wars” check out Turn Me Up.

[Image Source: Allposters]

[1]http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

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