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Loudness War
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Before we begin, this article isn't about cranking up your stereo; it's about the music itself and the media it's etched or printed onto, and how it can make the act of cranking up your stereo have no effect. This non-effect is called clipping and is usually a result of excessive loudness. Ever since the dawn of humanity, it's been a known fact that people respond more easily to louder audio stimuli. Thus the illusion that "LOUDER = BETTER". With the advent of music recording technology, the music industry sought to capitalize on this; if our album is louder than their album, and the listeners don't adjust their volume dials to compensate (or can't, if they're hearing it in a bar, a gramophone with no volume dial, etc.), our album will sound better! However, vinyl records suffer from physical limitationsnote for example, too much bass can bump the needle out of place, and too much high end can destroy the printing needle when creating a record! that necessarily constrain the physical (and perceived) loudness of a record. The search for loudness became easier with the introduction of the compact disc in 1982; now working with a digital storage medium, sound engineers found themselves liberated from the former physical constraints on perceived loudness. Any recording medium has an absolute limit when it comes to amplitude, and compact discs are no exception. Once audio engineers managed to max out, the only solution to out-loud those other CDs was to break out the dynamic range compression, which squashes every bit up to the same volume level, causing listener fatigue.note In addition to dynamic range compression, sound engineers can use overdrive distortion (or outright digital clipping) to further increase the average amplitude of a track. Another trick is to increase the "perceived loudness" of a track by emphasizing frequency ranges the human ear is more sensitive to (highs and high-mids) and de-emphasizing others (very low sub bass and sometimes mids). The often-used analogy here is that of attempting to read a text written entirely in capitals in a huge font. In movies, Orange/Blue Contrast has a similar effect; since the contrast is pleasing to the eye, producers will push at as far as possible, often over-saturating the film in these colours and squashing out more subtle colours entirely. Compression is not inherently bad. In fact, it is an essential part of the sound engineer's toolkit, used to level out the inconsistent volume in a track.note This is practically guaranteed to happen when recording live material. Especially bass guitars. Furthermore, it can be used creatively to manipulate the sound of a single instrumentnote especially drums, where compression is often used to emphasize the body or tail of a strike or even a full mix, "gluing" the tracks together. However, if used ineptly, it can result in unpleasant changes like undesired pumping, outright distortion, or a more abstract loss of "life" or "impact". It may be worth noting that, due to the general trend of increasing loudness of commercial releases over time, a release that would have qualified as an example of this trope in 1995 would not necessarily qualify as an example of this trope in 2005 or 2015 (unless it's by Oasis). Similarly, an album that would qualify as an aversion of this trope now would not have qualified as an aversion in 1995. An album that comes out to DR8 generally qualifies as good mastering by today's standards, but would not have been two decades ago. When looking at examples of this trope, it's probably worth noting that they're graded on a curve, so to speak. Note that this is a separate issue from the loudness or intensity of music by genre. When loud music is used as a weapon, that's Loud of War. See also Ridiculously Loud Commercial for similar techniques used in advertising. |
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Folk Metal band Moonsorrow consistently use compression and distortion to give a larger than life sound to their albums. This is most noticeable on their debut Suden uni, their 2007 album V: Hävititty and their 2008 EP Tulimyrsky. The albums have been remastered and re-released on vinyl, where they are still clipped, but it's less severe/noticeable. They have abandoned this with their latest album, Jumalten aika, which comes in at DR9 and sounds great. | |
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Grand Theft Auto V's Self Radio custom station added in the PC version is badly wrecked by the game's horrendously compressed audio. Depending on the song, it can either be quiet to the point of being drowned out by engine noises or louder than the game itself! | |
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Experimental hip-hop group Death Grips. Exmilitary, their debut album/mixtape has an album gain of -13.04dB. One song, "Spread Eagle Cross the Block", has an insane ReplayGain value of -14.64dB. No Love Deep Web, their third album also uses very heavy distortion but not quite to the extent of their debut (album gain of -11.62dB, the loudest song at -13.13dB). Their other album, The Money Store is still loud but not as loud as the other two. They've also released the stems for Exmilitary on their website (as Black Google) to encourage remixing (with the side effect that people can make their own de-loudness war'd mixes) and released an "unmastered" version of The Money Store which is nowhere near as loud. |
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Games in general can be subject to this if the programmers don’t think about headroom when writing the audio management code, even if the individual sound effects aren’t themselves clipped. It works like this: games have to play multiple sound effects at once, so they end up stacked on top of one another. But if you just put in sounds that are normalised to -0.1 dB without adjusting the levels, they’re all already close enough to the 0 dB line at their peaks and troughs, so you’ll wind up with nowhere to go when you have more than one or two sound effects playing (or even, potentially, one sound effect playing on top of music), which results in an integer overflow – in other words, clipped game audio. The solution when making sound effects for a video game is to leave a lot of headroom with each sound effect (and the game soundtrack), so that when they stack on top of one another (which is inevitable, particularly in some game genres), they won’t clip too often. It’s probably impossible to stop the game audio from clipping at all, but the less often, the better, of course. The ideal solution is to simply program the game to reduce the levels of all the sound effects (and the soundtrack) by 12 dB or so before putting them together. One other solution, if the game’s programming isn’t that sophisticated, is to normalise sound effects to a much lower level than one would if were mastering for CD or the Web. This means a bit lower signal-to-noise ratio, but if you use 16- or especially 24-bit audio, this shouldn’t be a problem; even uncompressed 44.1-kHz, 24-bit sound effects won’t be too large compared to most of the graphical assets used in most modern games. (Game audio is also one case where 24-bit audio may actually be something more than a placebo, since the game has to adjust sound effect levels on the fly; adjusting the levels of dithered audio again reduces the effectiveness of the dithering to some extent, and 24-bit audio doesn’t need to be dithered because it already reproduces more dynamic range than humans are capable of hearing.) This has long been a problem affecting the video game industry; for instance, Marathon (1994) and its sequels (1995 and 1996) clip pretty badly whenever the player is battling enemies. Some of the sound effects are also themselves clipped, which was for stylistic reasons in certain cases (the VacBobs from the third game, who are supposed to sound like they’re talking over a crappy radio system), though by no means all. | |
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The alternative rock band Sleigh Bells went for an intentionally compressed sound, although their guitarist Derek Miller later admitted that his own music's loudness was annoying to him. | |
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One of the first examples is The Rolling Stones' single "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow". Although it's never been explained why, contemporary recording standards suggest that it must have been deliberate. | |
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Recent NHL Hockey games have touted being able to import custom audio for use as in-game music or sound effects. Unfortunately, the pre-existing audio is amplified so much that the feature is nearly useless. While you can increase the game's music volume in order to hear the imported songs, not all of the pre-existing sounds can be replaced, meaning you run the risk of blowing out your eardrums. | |
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Many acts on Ed Banger Records, like Justice, SebastiAn and Vicarious Bliss, who use absurd amounts of compression◊ to create a signature sound, and in Justice's case, using digital noise and clipping as an instrument. | |
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Deliberate over-amplification is part of the voice treatment for the Daleks, to help create the idea of a deranged alien mutant locked in a tin can, screaming into a microphone millimetres away from its mouth. | |
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In the Vinesauce fangame Vine Realms, Pantherk's sole voice clip (consisting simply of him saying his own name) is heavily compressed to the point of audibly clipping, nodding to a moment in one of Joel's streams where he modded the Mortal Kombat fangame the clip was sourced from by boosting it to the highest possible volume. Here, the poor mastering is similarly exploited by having Pantherk's voice be the loudest thing in the entire game, much louder than every other bit of audio present. | |
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