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Sunday, 4 September 2011
Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Dynamic Range Mastering In 2011
Five years on though, if I’m honest, I feel like that original article was far too long, repetitive, and rambling, and so I’ve decided to “remaster” it, as it were, trim it, shorten it, update it for 2011, and try and hammer the message home again. Dynamic range compression hasn’t gone away, and while there are plenty of records out there that still sound great, so much of the musical product we have foisted upon is so sonically subpar that people who express surprise at the continuing collapse of the record industry perpetually amaze me. So here goes.
Several months on from its release, and there are plenty of things I find unpleasant about Kanye West’s much lauded My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the overlong songs and overstuffed arrangements; Chris Rock’s not-offensive-enough-to-be-funny monologue about “re-upholstering” a woman’s sexual organs; the tedious, prog-like 4-minute vocoder “solo”. Not to mention Kanye’s perpetual, “Oh woe is me, I’m a poor rich man who does bad things” persona. But these all pale into insignificance next to the album’s most obnoxious feature: its horrific, distorted volume.
Because My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is loud. Really loud. If you open up an MP3 of one of its songs in an audio-editing program like Audacity, the waveform, a visual representation of the sound, looks like a brick. In fact, let me do it for you: this is 'Monster', the awesome, Nicki Minaj-starring peak of the album:
That blue space represents the sound you hear when you play the song – the vocals, beats, everything else; when it reaches the top and bottom of the grey bar it’s in that means it’s at maximum volume. The light grey space around the blue (you might have to squint; there’s not a lot of it to see) indicates points in the song where it’s not at maximum volume. As you can see, 'Monster' is at maximum volume for pretty much its entire length.
Once you’re at maximum volume, of course, there’s nowhere else for sound to go except “into the red”, which means distortion. With analogue distortion, this translates as a warm buzz that’s long been the sound of overdriven rock music. Digital distortion, unfortunately, is a very different sound; it’s usually described as “clipping” because the top of the waveform is literally flattened, as if someone had clipped the edges off with scissors.
What this brick-like waveform translates to when you actually play 'Monster' through a pair of speakers is a relentless assault where instruments and voices lack definition and start to blur together, where there’s no room for the music to breathe, no chance of a dramatic shift in volume as you surge into a chorus (remember The Pixies?), and where sound pushes into digital distortion when it tries to get any louder, because it simply has nowhere else to go.
Which may well have been Kanye’s intention, but when you consider that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is well over an hour long, and maintains this loud, blurred approach for its entire length, it becomes difficult to listen to without your attention wandering. Possibly to the thought of where there might be some aspirin.
This extreme loudness isn’t at all uncommon; in fact it’s an epidemic, and has been for some time. Loudness is measured in decibels RMS; in 1987, Guns n’Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction was considered loud, and averaged -15dB RMS volume, meaning the average volume was 15 decibels below what’s referred to as “digital zero”, the absolute maximum loudness that can be achieved.
By 1994 the average loudness for a rock record was -12dB. Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory in 1995 hit an extraordinary -8dB, meaning it seems more than twice as loud as Appetite for Destruction if they’re played with the volume dial in the same position. The 1997 remaster of The Stooges’ Raw Power reaches an unbelievable -4dB (meaning the sound barely ever dips below “digital zero”, and therefore the threat of digital clipping and distortion), making it supposedly the loudest rock record ever...
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Nick Southall @'The Quietus'
The Mind's Eye
David Hockney “draws” with images from nine cameras. Credit: David Hockney
One of your basic contentions, I say to the British artist David Hockney, is that there is always more to be seen, everywhere, all the time. "Yes," he replies emphatically. "There's a lot more to be seen." We are sitting in his spacious house in the quiet Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. In front of us is a novel medium, a fresh variety of moving image—a completely new way of looking at the world—that Hockney has been working on for the last couple of years.
We are watching 18 screens showing high-definition images captured by nine cameras. Each camera was set at a different angle, and many were set at different exposures. In some cases, the images were filmed a few seconds apart, so the viewer is looking, simultaneously, at two different points in time. The result is a moving collage, a sight that has never quite been seen before. But what the cameras are pointing at is so ordinary that most of us would drive past it with scarcely a glance.
At the moment, the 18 screens are showing a slow progression along a country road. We are looking at grasses, wildflowers, and plants at very close quarters and from slightly varying points of view. The nine screens on the right show, at a time delay, the images just seen on the left. The effect is a little like a medieval tapestry, or Jan van Eyck's 15th-century painting of Paradise, but also somehow new. "A lot of people who were standing in the middle of the Garden of Eden wouldn't know they were there," Hockney says.
The multiple moving images have some properties entirely different from those of a projected film. A single screen directs your attention; you look where the camera was pointed. With multiple screens, you choose where to look. And the closer you move to each high-definition image, the more you see.
Dürer used the media of the time—watercolor, pen, ink—to do something unprecedented: depict with great precision a little slice of wild, chaotic nature. He revealed what was always there but had never before been seen with such clarity. Hockney, in 2011, is doing the same job, using the tools of the moment: high-definition cameras and screens, computer software. Of course Hockney, too, is a painter—indeed, his grid of 18 flat screens, run by seven Mac Pro computers, looks much like one of his multipanel oil paintings. Except, of course, that every panel moves.
Hockney's technology assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, explains how this 21st-century medium works. "We use nine Canon 5D Mark II cameras on a rig we've made, mounted on a vehicle—either on the boot or on the side. Those are connected to nine monitors. I set it up initially, taking instructions from David, to block it in. At that point we decide the focal length and exposure of each camera. There are motorized heads with which we can pan and tilt, once we've got going, while we're moving along. There's a remote system he can operate from the car."
Hockney compares that process to drawing. For him, drawing is not merely a matter of making lines with a tool; it's fundamentally about constructing a two-dimensional image of three-dimensional space. He argues that the same is true of putting photographic images together in a collage, and also of altering a single photograph. Hockney complains that today's media are full of badly drawn (that is, Photoshopped) photographs...
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Martin Gayford @'technology review'
Systematically Biased Reporting
In June of 2010, a year and a half after the Israeli military launched what a United Nations investigation described as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” the New York Times sent a photographer into Gaza to capture a slice of daily life. Ethan Bronner, the Times Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote the narrative for the photo essay entitled “Gaza, Through Fresh Eyes,” in which he gushes about “jazzy cellphone stores and pricey restaurants … endless beaches with children whooping it up … the staggering quality of the very ordinary.” Seemingly lifted from an apolitical travel magazine, Bronner’s article merely alludes to families who have been “traumatized,” and omits any mention of the UN allegations of recently committed Israeli war crimes and human rights violations. Other than an oblique reference to “destroyed buildings” and “rubble,” Bronner’s travelogue also elides the vast civilian infrastructure Israel destroyed during the onslaught, including chicken farms, a flour mill, a sewage treatment plant, a UN school, vast tracts of civilian housing, government buildings, a prison, police stations, TV stations, newspapers ... and between 600 and 700 factories, workshops and businesses. The impression left by Bronner? Gaza is an OK place; nothing remarkable to see there, least of all evidence of Israeli war crimes; move along, move along.
And yet, what is not disclosed is that Ethan Bronner is married to an Israeli citizen and has a son who is enlisted in the Israeli army. When news of these familial connections broke, Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote an op-ed recommending that Bronner be reassigned to avoid any potential for bias. Executive editor Bill Keller refused, waiving the Times’s normally strict conflict of interest standards.
Times reporter Isabel Kershner is similarly compromised by elisions and distortions. When Kershner reported on Palestinian refugees in Syria who, in June 2011, nonviolently marched into the Golan Heights to protest, she failed to mention that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel. No government in the world recognizes the Golan Heights as legitimately part of the state of Israel. Kershner also omits the fact that the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homes is enshrined in UN resolutions and that Israel has consistently violated international law in preventing the refugees from returning to their homes. Let us also not forget that at this nonviolent protest the Israeli army killed 22 Palestinian and Syrian protesters. In addressing the apparently overwhelming violence against unarmed protesters, Kershner reports: “Israeli officials say they tried every nonlethal method of crowd control at their disposal” before they opened fire “at the feet of the protesters,” implying that the killings were unintentional, and unavoidable, and defied the laws of physics. Kershner quotes none of the protesters as to what they saw. If she had, she may have heard what activist and eyewitness Salman Fakhreddin told independent journalist Jillian Kestler-D’Amours: “Israel decided to kill people in order to frighten them because Israel is afraid of the delegitimization of the state of Israel and Israeli policy in the international community.” By now it may not be a surprise to learn that Kershner is an Israeli citizen who is married to an Israeli citizen and who spent “a couple decades in Israeli journalism and Jewish education” before joining the American paper in 2007.
In large part because of Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner’s ahistorical, context-free, reporting-in-a-vacuum, the New York Times is to blame for what Adbusters has previously called “the United States of Amnesia.” American citizens are left unaware of Israel’s current and historical violations of international law and are thus unable to question their government’s multibillion dollar military giveaways to Israel, a state that just happens to be these two reporters’ adopted home.
Matthew A. Taylor @'Adbusters'
Ry Cooder’s Elegant Indignation
Cooder’s guitar playing is expressive, elegant, and rhythmically intricate. It frequently has a pressured attack that he has described as having the feel of “some kind of steam device gone out of control.” His sense of phrasing was partly imprinted in his childhood by a record of brass music made by a group of African-American men who found instruments in a field left by Civil War soldiers during a retreat, and played them according to their own inclinations. If you wonder what his sensibility sounds like when applied to rock ‘n’ roll—one version of it anyway—the most widely known example I can think of comes from the period when Cooder had been hired to augment the Rolling Stones during the recording of “Let It Bleed.” He was playing by himself in the studio, goofing around with some changes, when Mick Jagger danced over and said, How do you do that? You tune the E string down to D, place your fingers there, and pull them off quickly, that’s very good. Keith, perhaps you should see this. And before long, the Rolling Stones were collecting royalties for “Honky Tonk Women,” which sounds precisely like a Ry Cooder song and absolutely nothing like any other song ever produced by the Rolling Stones in more than forty years. According to Richards in his recent autobiography, Cooder showed him the open G tuning which became his mainstay and accounts for the full-bodied chordal declarations that characterize songs such as “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Start Me Up,” and “Brown Sugar.” The most succinct way I can think of to describe the latticed style that Keith Richards says he has sought to achieve with Ron Wood is to say that for thirty-five years the Stones have been trying to do with four hands what Cooder can do with two...
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Alec Wilkinson @'The New Yorker'
Four Tet - FabricLive #59 Promo Mix
Four Tet's 30 minute promo mix of his FabricLive #59 'Love letter to London', out on Fabric Records September 19th 2011 (courtesy of Tailored Communication).
FabricLive #59 promo mix tracklist:
1. Four Tet - Locked
2. Floating Points - Untitled
3. Crazy Bald Heads - First Born
4. Sevi G - Beautiful Music (El-B remix)
5. Bad Bwoy Beats - Don't Go There
6. NnG - I Keep
7. Roger O'Donnell - The Truth in You (Four Tet remix)
8. Juk Juk - Winter Turn Spring
9. Michel Redolfi - Immersiens Partial
10. Daphni - Ye Ye
zenjournalist Andrew MacG Marshall
Everybody comes out of the #wikileaks unredacted document dump looking bad: Guardian, Assange, and Domscheit-Berg. Sad end to a great scoop.
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