Louder sounds better – at least that is what we perceive. When comparing two versions of a song that only differ in their volume, the louder one seems to sound better. You can experience this phenomenon when talking to ads on the radio: A warm, saturated voice praises some product and creates the desire for shopping just through its atmosphere…

In the music production industry, it is an open secret that major productions are being tuned more and more towards volume, so that they will be perceived as better by the listeners. Some technical tricks ar needed to achieve this. The dynamic content of the musical signal (that is, the differences in volume) is reduced, so that everything can be turned a bit more loud. Unfortunately, you don't get the volume for free – if you overdo it, it will cost you technical and musical quality.

In the last year, the loudness wars have become a more and more serious problem. A current example is Metallica's “Death Magnetic” (some background information can be found at Wikipedia and the Mastering Media Blog).

Yesterday, I found a relatively new non-profit group founded by Friedemann Tischmeyer with the somewhat weird name “Pleasurize Music Foundation”. They are trying to fight against the loudness wars with an ingenious concept: Using a free plugin, music producers can measure the dynamic content of their recordings and put a sticker on their album with the value they measured (on a scale defined by that foundation). The plan is for this value to serve as a seal of quality for good music production. Currently, they have a beta version of their plugin available for people to try, and plan to have a finished verison by June. I'm curious to see what will come out of it…