Another break is over and with that comes new jobs. This first week has more been getting the information of scheduling and initial project work, as well as, being introduced to the key concepts of this next trimester. This includes trailer mixing, 5.1 surround sound and mastering. I’m hoping to next week have more of a schedule to help stay on top of it all. I have also already started reaching out to contacts of mine for the larger project which will hopefully be a binaural piece.
The first project is a trailer mix of A Quiet Place II which is a film that I have never seen due to my general dislike towards watch things that scare me (trust me I jump even if I know there is a jump scare). This piece is different to the Zootopia (although my setup of my television being a second screen persists) and For the Birds projects as I have majority of the audio assets given to me. I have already created my sessions for dialogue, music, foley, SFX and a master. I have downloaded the dialogue already and timed it up to the clip as well. I also downloaded the music so that I can start to play around with the soundscape. I also have a spotting list of sounds that as not given to me so that I can start to research and plan how I am going to record these. I have not stated this yet as I wanted to talk to some colleagues of mine to see whether there was a time that suited that we could record the sounds for each other.
The other thing I did was learn about calibration of a studio. This was interesting as I knew about the concept but was unfamiliar with the specifics. We followed the ITU standard for a 5.1 system which requires all the speakers to be the same distance away from the sweet spot (ideal playback spot) and reproducing the same SPL. The SPL meter needs to be in ‘C’ weighting on the speed slow. This was a valuable lesson as I can now use this in other studios to make sure that I am listening to the best possible playback, although everything did seem incredibly quiet in comparison for the rest of the day.
I did, however, do some more research into a topic that I hear thrown around a lot the Loudness Wars. I was told to look into the person Bob Ludwig as he has spoken on the topic a lot and the history.
I quickly found his interview with Bobby Owsinski (who is like the god of audio engineering books) which told the beginning of the wars. Ludwig stated that the Loudness Wars came from the beginning of digital domain compressors that allowed for the increase in the apparent level without less music destruction than analogue (Owsinski et al., 2014). He continued to state that the major record labels at the time would listen to other labels singles and want heirs to be louder to grab the radio station’s attention (Owsinki et al., 2014). Ludwig said this was fine for a single, but it became tiring when listening to a whole album (Owsinksi et al., 2014). He further iterates this view in another interview where he states that Susan Rodgers (from Berklee College) talked about how the hair cells in our ear stops reacting to stimulus with loud compressed music (Castle, 2012). This was fascinating as it explains why I struggled to listen to a full album growing up in the worst time for the Loudness Wars. One interesting phenomenon in more recent times was Metallica’s Death Magnetic album where fans petitioned for it to be remastered after hearing the Guitar Hero version which had no digital compression on it (Siegel, 2009). Another interesting point was made by Dr. Andrew Oxenham, who specialises in auditory perception and began his career as a recording engineer, is that the louder the music is the less we notice the coding errors of digital music however, this can be substituted with using a higher sample rate and bit-depth (Siegel, 2009). The final article I read was by Emmanuel Deruty who had gone and analysed songs from the 1960s all the way to 2010 to see the effect of the Loudness Wars over time. Using RMS he noted that albums are roughly 5dB louder nowadays then the 70s however, this doesn’t account for perceived loudness. He used the Crest factor to try and quantify some results. The Crest factor is the difference between the RMS and the Peak level, the lower the Crest factor supposedly the more compressed the track (Deruty, 2011). The Crest factor has changed in three obvious phases. The first is an increase with the advancement in studio gear between the 1960s and the 1980s (Deruty, 2011). The second is a relatively stable Crest factor between the 1980s until the 1990s (Deruty, 2011). Then the Crest factor falls from the 1990s until 2010 which happens to be about 3dB (Deruty, 2011). One major change though is the music consumed by mass-audience was rap in the 90s which used drastic cuts in level compared to mellow transitions and how level variation created the song structure (Deruty, 2011). All of these factors create a complex web that resulted in the mess of the last few decades of loudness over musicality. I for one am happy that normalisation has become mainstream with the increase of streaming as it has allowed me to hear the music in the songs that I listen to again.
I know that this post is less of a cohesive idea and more of a combination of parts. I hope however, it can show the beginning of where my work is headed and a topic that was interesting to dive into. I hope that next week I will have a clearer schedule to show and more direct creative intent for A Quiet Place II trailer.
References
Castle, C. (2012). Recording Tips for the Loudness Wars: An Interview with Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering [Blog]. Retrieved 5 October 2020, from https://thetrichordist.com/2012/06/28/recording-tips-for-the-loudness-wars-an-interview-with-bob-ludwig-of-gateway-mastering/.
Deruty, E. (2011). 'Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War. Sound On Sound. Retrieved 6 October 2020, from https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war.
Owsinski, B., Merton, O., & Tanamachi, M. (2014). The Mastering Engineer's Handbook (3rd ed.). Cengage Learning PTR.
Siegel, R., (2009). The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse [Radio Broadcast]. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse.
Creative Commons Credit
‘Bob Ludwig Gateway’ by Gatewaybob, Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BobLudwigGateway.jpg under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Full Terms at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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