(View the conversation page here: www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne )
As I stated already, what "sounds best" is highly subjective. Subjective to the listening environment, the genre of music, the intended audience. Just as David Byrne talks about in the beginning of the video, it's no accident that the west African music sounds the way it does or is written in such a way that compliments it's listening environment (free field), or that early band music used instruments that could project well in a small venue to be heard well above the ambient noise of the audience dancing and yelling and whatever else it is one would do there.
Fast forward to today and we have such amazing technology to allow us to create, simulate, emulate, even overcome obstacles in achieving just about any type of sonic impact we want, which makes it all the more critical and complex on just about every "job" in this industry. Everyone, even professionals in the industry - have personal tastes when it comes to what sounds pleasing to them. Not just musical genres, but the particular mixing and mastering styles, "sonic signatures" if you will.
Imagine the sound capabilities and quality of the earliest phonograph recordings being the particular sonic signature a modern band wanted to encapsulate their music. I can't vouch for anyone else, but I would assume today's audience would not be pleased by a recording of a modern band that sounded as such.
As a mix engineer, there is a true and mysterious art to getting the recordings to sound the way we expect them to. Today's music is so heavily processed there is rarely any concept of the natural or "raw" sonic impact of what the instruments sound like. I usually hear people say (and I've said it myself too) that when we do our job right we become invisible. Our jobs aren't actually transparent anymore, it's quite the opposite. The post-production desired and even required by modern tastes have created a huge demand for a certain level of "polish" to be recognized by the "mainstream audience".
Take a listen to your favorite band's album. Go ahead, pick one.. take a listen, and tell me if you've heard that band sound EXACTLY the same live. I'm not talking about imperfections in live versus recorded performance, as I'm pretty sure everyone is aware of auto-tune and "time correcting". What I'm referring to is the particular sounds of instruments, their presence in the mix and the ability to hear every instrument clearly.
Live performances have a very very different sound to them. Whether it's a tiny band performing without any PA system in a garage venue or a popular band playing at a huge arena venue, the mixes differ greatly. The sounds between those environments also are very different. Lets take the recording you listened to and imagine hearing that same song performed live. It's almost impossible to get the exact same sonic signature out of each and every instrument, even the performance has to change. Where once a vocalist might have been just above a whisper in your ear in the recording now has to sing much louder to achieve unity and harmony with the song in the context of a live performance. The impact is as David Byrne mentioned: A product of the environment.
Even deeper however, the live performance is still subject to the technical and creative abilities and tools of the mixing engineers; both Front of House: who creates the mix for the audience, and the monitor engineer - who must often create individual mixes for the various performers on stage to hear what they need to perform at their best. The original sound source may sound almost nothing alike when comparing the "raw" to the processed.
So here we are today, with recording technology more easily accessible and available to more of the public than ever before. The landscape of the music world shifting greatly as the industry that arose from it is now subject to change according to the freedom of the masses now able to "do it yourself" where once access and resources were save for the select group of those chosen based on their "sell-ability". The sea of music online and available in stores now is so vast it is almost as if the magic of the impulse buy has left us. People hear demos online of bands that are "less than polished" and it has become so saturated that the likelihood of the audience connecting with it puts them off to the possibility of spending money on a product when they feel it is inferior.
That particular magical allure has faded and people spend less on the impulse buy to pay homage to the artist for their ideas. It may not be the artist's fault at all in fact; the idea may be a great one. However, it may have been poorly executed, or just not right for the particular sonic signature that was achieved. Music is highly emotional, and the sonic impact it has is the driving factor that must be executed precisely or else the emotional impact is lost.
An individual can pick up an instrument, a microphone, and a recording interface to a computer and easily make their ideas into a product available on a global market. That's a lot of power. However, the expectation of the modern audience has also never been higher. We expect to hear perfect music. The best possible representation of the idea or concept that lets the listener transcend the medium and connect with the idea internally - emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise.
I've heard the phrase "loudness war" many times since I've pursued the audio engineering path and today i'm less and less convinced it is simply about that anymore. The revolution of independent freedom from the tradition of the market being closed doors has also put a lot of scrutiny on it. It's both helped and hurt it. I'm more convinced the loudness war isn't as relevant as is the war on education. The technology may be available to just about anyone now, but the education and understanding of how sound and music work are still (if not more) important and no more or less available than before.
I just thought I'd post something in between all the jobs I've been busy with. There will be more updates coming soon as we head in to the final days of the EP project, and should have several video updates for them soon.
I pose a question, and I hope everyone who wishes to leave their answers in the comments below be unafraid of criticism for it. It's your opinion and it is most welcome. Do you think that audio engineers are as much a part of the music now as the artist who wrote and/or performed the material?
Loved every second of both reading and watching this.
ReplyDeleteAs to the question in you posited in your closing paragraph, I believe that is completely true for the majority of top 40 hip-hop and pop. I'm unsure of how that truth holds up in the country and rock sectors of music,however...
I do know that there are artists in the industry who try to avoid this, however. Some of the more obvious artists such as Muse and Linkin Park (whose albums are meant to be as close to a cinematic experience as possible) are known for spending as much time as possible doing their own mixing, choosing to leave all creative input in their hands.
*this being the included TED talk
ReplyDelete@ Anonymous. The way David described Hip hop being targeted for high end car stereo systems, I definitely agree with your opinion. A lot of people, musicians included - don't realize that modern recording practices like putting a microphone directly up to the guitar amp's speaker imparts a certain sonic quality that isn't natural. You wouldn't put your ears right up to a speaker, why would you put a microphone up to it that way? Country, Rock, Alternative, and even Pop are all guilty of this. The part where David talks about the vocal performances varying from quieter passages due to the technology allowing performers to practically whisper into the microphone to get that intimate feeling like they're literally caressing your ear with the music. That is very much an effect achieved by the technology. We're so used to hearing this though it really does seem as though this is transparent and that is how the voice should sound.
ReplyDeleteThe bigger debate has usually been the loudness wars - use of severe compression and dynamic processing techniques to squeeze every last ounce of volume into the medium so that when the product goes commercial it's "loud" across a broadcast and easier to hear wherever it is heard. There has been quite a few initiatives that quite a few artists across many genres have sided with audio enthusiasts that believe preserving the dynamics is the best option. I for one know bands like Opeth have been about preserving their dynamics and allowed their mixing and mastering to reflect this, their album Blackwater Park isn't blasted into the ceiling and held their until the end of the song. Even throughout the program material when looking at the audio in a waveform one can easily see the amount of headroom and dynamic peaks and troughs in the material, everything maintains their dynamics. I'd really like to see this initiative get even more widespread. It could very well happen especially as this music landscape continues to shift because of the freedom of the web and digital devices. The biggest pressure for maintaining the loudness war is that Broadcast and large labels are the ones requiring their material be as consistently loud as everything else being broadcast so that their material is heard equally as well.