“When Music Died”

I have often thought that modern music, really anything more recent than the 1980s, seemed to be missing something. I used to attribute it to the beginning of digital recording studios, but I learned recently that there is another reason and it’s probably the bigger one. A great classic rock song, “American Pie,” has a line about when the music died. Honestly it was around that same time that this particular phenomenon in modern music occurred.

It all started in the early 1980s when music producers learned that louder music was more noticeable and gained popularity faster on radio stations. It was mainly because the drastic volume change between louder songs and the softer music of the day made people pay attention. This led to a trend where, over the next 40 years of music, it became progressively louder. As the music became louder, it had less dynamic range.

“American Pie” is a great example of classic rock where they used the dynamic range to drive home the message of the song. If you listen closely you find that it is easy to hear transitions from the softer verses of the song to the louder chorus. You will also notice a lot of stereo effects where the studio adjusted the volume of the left and right channels separately to give a new dimension to the music. It was during this era that the dynamic range was heavily utilized in music.

To explain dynamic range, it is the overall difference between the softest and loudest sections of a song. Most modern music has a dynamic range of only 3-5 decibels; in the late 1970s the classic rock song had a dynamic range of 15-20 decimals. These were not slight changes in volume, but sharp changes, giving the feel of an extra underlying rhythm in the song. Honestly these large dynamic ranges in music started with the blues, giving them the most unique musical sound in history.

There is some good news on the horizon for music lovers that have felt something missing in modern music. The streaming services have made the realization that most modern music is lacking the element of dynamic range. Some of the reason behind this is auto-leveling features of their platform attempting to keep the volume level consistent, but a majority of it comes from modern recording studios doing the same. No one noticed that balancing the volume level of a song killed the underlying rhythm and general mood of the music. Three streaming services are pushing artists and recording studios to start improving the quality of recordings by bringing back this long missing feature.

So if you are like me and felt like something was missing, you were not wrong. I always thought until recently it was because of the digital sampling rate reducing the overall quality of the recording, and that might have something to do with it. However I now think the real issue is the lack of dynamic range. Take a moment to listen to some classic rock this week and see if you can tell the difference. For me it is now really hard not to notice the major shifts in audio levels on classic rock that no longer appear in things like Taylor Swift’s music, for example. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.