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Wednesday September 12, 2007 
• iPods and mp3 Ruining Music? Are iPods and mp3 compression ruining music? There's an interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal, as a followup perhaps on the IEEE Spectrum article sited below in a previous post on this blog. It's good to see (and hear) that I'm not alone in this concern.
( Sep 12 2007, 01:50:37 PM PDT )
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That's a function of the music and its production, not of the delivery vehicle. Notice how you can't listen to classical music on the highway, or worse yet on an airplane, because the dynamic range results in all the quiet passages getting clipped by road noise? You need a decent listening environment. You could always process the MP3 to compress the dynamic range so you could listen to it - though with less pleasure. But the music that's most popular now loses little from dynamic compression. If we conclude the music is thus little different from noise itself - well I suppose that just proves we're over 30.
Posted by Walter Bays on September 12, 2007 at 02:43 PM PDT #
That's partially true. What I think the article points out is that recording engineers are having to make compromises based on the leading delivery systems (ok, we'll use your term), and many of those compromises tend to dumb down (my term) the sound, down to the lowest common denominator.
Where you choose to listen to music is a personal choice. When I produce my music radio program for KALW, I do have to consider that some people might be listening in their car, so a 30 min piece that never gets beyond pp is probably not appropriate.
But music producers now have to deal with the problem that probably more people listen to music via their mp3 player (or over the internet, as I am doing right now (Counterstream Radio over Live365.com), and all that entails.
So, should they bother with high production standards, or make everything sound like it was recorded on a cell phone?
Posted by rchrd on September 12, 2007 at 02:55 PM PDT #
Cell phone I guess, since attention spans are about the length of a ringtone anyway. :-) Musicians play with signal processing a lot now. Listen to Tranzania (see my blog). It's techno/trance (maybe the music style closest to your "wall of noise") together with traditional acoustic (most immune from dynamic compression). About 5 minutes in I think they compress both frequency range and dynamic range. You can just see the music retreating into a pocket radio, only to come blasting back out later.
Posted by Walter Bays on September 12, 2007 at 03:44 PM PDT #