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The musically omnivorous site Popdose reviewed High School Musical-spawned starlet Ashley Tisdale’s Guilty Pleasure, and the report, despite having the subtitle “How Bad Can It Be?”, is actually not all that bad: Writer Jack Feerick has fun playing what he calls “Spot The Influence” with the album and marveling at its unhingedness, although he hates that the act of listening to it has unwittingly dragged him into the Loudness Wars that previously trapped people who committed the crime of wanting to listen to Metallica’s Death Magnetic:
What’s not so fun, though, is listening to all the songs in a row; that’s just kind of exhausting. The album fades in on the sounds of an orchestra tuning up, and it’s the last moment of unprocessed, acoustically-produced sound you’ll hear for the duration. I probably sound like a cranky old man pissing against the tides of modernity, but it’s God’s own truth. I find myself energized by listening to a spacious recording of live instruments interacting, but the hot, hyper-compressed mix of Guilty Pleasure literally fatigued me. Look at the waveform on this.
Everything’s in clip, and even at a low volume, after a while my ears just wanted to fold themselves shut. The vocals are the worst of it, multi-tracked, pitch-shifted, and quantized from here to sonority. The inescapable synthetic quality is enough to send me out to a karaoke happy hour, just to be reminded of that sound unprocessed human voices. It’s soul music for Cylons, and as a default setting it gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.
That waveform is for the track “How Do You Love Someone,” which does indeed have that Velveeta feel that super-processed pop has these days:
What I’m wondering is: Is there a pop song out there with an even more clippy waveform? And—and this is just some idle speculation being thrown out on a Friday afternoon, which I might very well pick up on later—how is the creation of these fatigue-inducing albums having an effect on peoples’ ability to consume pop music over semi-lengthy periods of time, by which I mean “the length of an album, or even of a commercial-free block on a Top 40 radio station”? Tisdale’s album, just for the sake of throwing statistics into the mix, sold 25,000 copies in its first week—hardly High School Musical numbers. Sure, correlation isn’t causation, but the fact that these super-sweet aural confections aren’t exactly doing gangbusters in the marketplace is certainly worth bringing up.
Ashley Tisdale, “Guilty Pleasure” [Popdose]
Never mind the music, what a terrible video.
Much as I like it, the Kelly Clarkson album has got to have nearly as monolithic a waveform. When I play it, it just exhausts my ears.
The compression on this just gives the music a fizzy quality. The drums sound like someone hitting a piece of paper although that might be an issue with how they were recorded rather than treated.
The weird thing is that radio already compresses songs when they are broadcast so I don’t think there would be much of an effect.
Hopefully this misuse of compression will go the way of the gated reverb.
Yeah, it’s nasty, but you really can’t judge from a lo-res audio track that has been further compressed by YouTube’s codec. It’s “fizzy” because it’s essentially an mp3 of an mp3 (or whatever codec they originally used prior to uploading). Of course there are digital artifacts…
And you can’t tell if the track is clipping at the resolution displayed on that waveform. Sure, it’s a band of darkness, but unless you zoom in all the way you can’t tell if the waveform is clipped — as evidenced by a completely truncated top to the wave — or if the compression apparently applied during mastering is doing its (evil!!) job and clamping it down more euphoniously.
As for other examples…pretty much any modern recording! Rich Costey is a genius at mixing all the way to the limit. Check any track on Muse’s Absolution or Our Love To Admire by Interpol — a solid band (at the zoom setting of the above example) yet not clipping. And, IMHO, great mixes.
like trommelkopf said, the way the zoomed out waveform looks is no indication of the amount of brickwall limiting. The song could be quite dynamic and look like that. And yes you can’t really tell what the song actually sounds like from a lo-res Youtube clip.
Not that there aren’t several recording sins involved that are audible, starting with the autotune cheating, the absurd amount of vocal compression and the emphasis on the high mids between 1 and 2 khz.
I’m reminded every time I see actual acoustic music how bizarrely skewed the frequency balance is in modern recorded music. If you see an orchestra perform the low frequencies, up to about 1 khz, predominate. The higher frequencies are quite subtle. When you do get a splash of high frequency — a cymbal crash, for example, it’s an exciting contrast to the nominal sound.
Contrast that with the edginess of this song. I think you can say the exhausting part of this recording is less due to compression — though it is compressed all to hell — and more to overuse of effects like the BBE Sonic Maximizer or Aphex Aural Exciter. When applied with restraint, they can have an effect like removing a blanket covering a speaker, but when you go nuts with them the sound gets really harsh and fatiguing.