The atonal century

Reposted from The National Post

John Keillor, Monday, January 14, 2008

This year marks the centenary of monosodium glutamate, drip coffee makers, the FBI and -- most importantly -- atonality as we know it.

In 1908, Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg led the classical tradition away from its audience, changing the world with music not in any key and of no commercial value. He put music before audiences, both literally and figuratively, and in doing so created some of Western culture's best music while gutting classical's contemporary significance.

Schoenberg started writing compositions as a child in the 1880s, studying Bach and Mozart passionately. And though none of his family was artistic, his music began demonstrating genius, soon blending the sounds of those romantic antipodes, Brahms and Wagner.

In the late 19th century, European opinion was primarily divided between these two composers. Brahms was a supposed reactionary who nonetheless wrote the first pieces that were completely thematic, wherein every bit of the score was related to the main melody. Wagner's blatantly progressive, extended tonalities seemed too delicate to support Brahms' tight melodic weaves.

Nonetheless, Schoenberg put them together in his 1899 Transfigured Night, when he was just 25. It wasn't merely beautiful, sophisticated music; this half-hour string sextet was wise and heart-wrenching, on par with the best of Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Schoenberg didn't just want to entertain; he was a culture warrior who said things like, "I have discovered a technique that will guarantee German music's supremacy for the next thousand years."

At the turn of the century, most serious artists in Vienna were confronting psychoanalysis by looking inward.

Painters were on the front lines of new ideas back then, and Schoenberg was active in this art as well. He and cutting-edge younger Viennese visual artists like Egon Shiele and Oskar Kokoschka were interested in the bald psychological stresses hinted at on the canvases of Klimt, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Bodies and landscapes could now be legitimately, hideously rendered if the artist was revealing truth, the same way clenched hands betray the lie behind a smile. This style was dubbed expressionism, pulling the romantic pose inside out.

Schoenberg's view of musical history allowed for a similar inversion. It ran something like this: from Mozart to Mahler, classical music became more and more dissonant, with more chromatic (or "wrong") notes in it, so that it was more indirect overall with each generation. The handling of chromatic notes was critical to a composer's unique sound. Schoenberg concluded that since wrong notes were coming more and more into the foreground of compositions, that they were music's progressive impetus.

But the public was uninterested in difficult music. Schoenberg barely supported his family as a conductor. Critics were childishly toxic, writing clever cruelties like "Transfigured Night sounds similar to Tristan and Isolde if the ink were smeared across Wagner's score." By today's standards, these dissonances are no more offensive than one of Danny Elfman's soundtracks.

Today, Schoenberg's genius (if not his saleability) is questionable only to insincere people, though Schoenberg himself had doubts. He said that God was telling him to say something new, but that his mortal ears couldn't absorb God's message. So instead of being pleased with having a few bona fide masterpieces under his belt, Schoenberg was often depressed, complaining that his music was derivative of the human condition, rather than accurately recording what God was telling him to say.

This artistic quandary, both aesthetic and moral, didn't exist before Schoenberg. He wasn't a showman or an opportunist like Beethoven, who used his influence to sway court judges, or to charge fans money to watch him eat in restaurants. Schoenberg was the sort of guy who publicly affirmed his Judaism the day Hitler assumed the Chancellorship. The composer even travelled to Berlin just to do that. His absolute courage and sincerity extended to all things.

But what seems to have pushed his imagination over tonality's edge was more personal and tangible.

In the summer of 1908, while writing a song cycle titled The Book of the Hanging Garden, Schoenberg was vacationing in Grunden with his family. During this time, his wife Matilde left her husband to live with his painting instructor, Richard Gerstl. During the months his wife was absent, Schoenberg completed the song cycle with the last two numbers lacking any final cadence or primary chord. He suspended the traditional resolutions in his music, reflecting the upheaval in his marriage.

His students made regular contact with Matilde until she was convinced to return. She eventually conceded that autumn. Gerstl burned all his paintings and then fatally stabbed himself.

The next piece Schoenberg completed, in time for Christmas, was his second string quartet. It was dedicated to his wife, and the tonal centre was again undetectable in the final movements. In its place was a soprano soloist singing a Stefan George poem that begins "I feel the air of other planets."

Schoenberg believed that he was closer to God's message now, and he never went back to tonality. His conviction influenced generations of composers who felt that a return to tuneful tonality was a backward tendency, fascistic even. A century of avant-garde music was thus born. Academics and connoisseurs really appreciated the results, though the general public assumed a thousand years of music just stopped being made.

The closest thing we have to a recent mainstream compositional hero was the grinning deconstructionist John Cage, who was, incidentally, also Schoenberg's student. The performance arm of classical has successfully kept the tradition breathing, but its pendulum remains stuck to the populist end of the artistic spectrum. Now we just keep playing the old favourites while, hopefully, new composers figure something out.

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

The Death of High Fidelity

Originally published in Rolling Stone December 2007

In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever

ROBERT LEVINE

Posted Dec 26, 2007 1:27 PM

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

"If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas. "When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing — you're being hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."

Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl rec- ords, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun."

It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."

Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more conven- ience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."

But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."

Sounding Off on the Sound Wars: Top Producers and Artists Speak Out

This is what I think is happening: Everybody has iPods, so you can't get them that loud. So they have a algorithm called a "finalizer" — it's not that new, but the way people are using it is new — and it makes your music sound louder. People will ruin their records and CDs. I was really stunned by the CD the guy gave me when I listened to it at home — it sounded crazy! It was like, abort mission! Supposedly it sounds fine on your iPod, but if you take the CD and put it on your hi-fi CD player you can hear the digital clipping. It's a big news story over in England."
— Kim Deal, on mastering the new Breeders album, Mountain Battles

"Compression is a necessary evil. The artists I know want to sound competitive. You don't want your track to sound quieter or wimpier by comparison. We've raised the bar and you can't really step back."
— Butch Vig, producer and Garbage mastermind

"We're conforming to the way machines pay music. It's robots' choice. It used to be ladies' choice — now it's robots' choice."
— Donald Fagen, producer and Steely Dan frontman

"I believe that if a vocalist is hyper-tuned, it's less personal. I have no aversion to using Auto-Tune when I have to. But I think listeners can hear it."
— Brendan O'Brien, producer of Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine and Bruce Springtseen's The Rising and Magic

"I think there's been a huge shift in how people listen to music. They used to get as good a stereo as they could. Now they want an iPod. And the audiophiles have moved on to multimedia. But to get the content to people, you have to play by their rules."
— Matt Serletic, Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul producer and former chief executive, Virgin Records

"A&R people like the compressed aesthetic because they can take it to the radio. They think if they want to have a hit record they have to spend a lot of money so they want to cover themselves. But if you think about the classic records, none of them are squashed."
— Mitchell Froom, producer of albums by Los Lobos, Elvis Costello and others

"I find it quite interesting, and I think its instructive, that if you focus on one area of the music business — you could generally call it music for people over twenty-four — and you look at the last ten years and look at records that have come out of nowhere, that no one's putting any money behind and have takes off, the two things that come to mind are the Buena Vista Social Club and Norah Jones. And those records were made in the most old-fashioned ways you can imagine." — Joe Boyd, producer of several Richard Thompson albums and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction

"I cant tell you how many times someone comes in and plays me something he wants mastered and I'll say, 'Do you want to make it slamming loud or retain some of this great sound?' They'll say, 'We want to keep it really pristine.' Then the next day they'll call me and say, 'How come mine isn't as loud as so and so's?' "
— Bernie Grundman, mastering engineer

"With the Beatles or Rolling Stones, they'd be a little sharp or flat, but no one would care — that was rock. Now if someone's out of tune or out of time, they treat it as a mistake and correct it."
— Ted Jensen, mastering engineer

Loudness War
Since the mid-1990s, engineers have used dynamic compression to make CDs louder and louder. These waveforms show how loud contemporary recordings have become:

Nirvana
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Back in 1991, even the loudest rock wasn't always loud: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has plenty of fluctuations in its volume — so when Kurt Cobain screams, you feel it.

Arctic Monkeys
"I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor"
This 2006 track is a prime offender: The sound wave is cranked to the limit, and it stays there for nearly every second of the song. Have a headache yet?

U2
"With or Without You" (Original)

U2
"With or Without You" (Remastered)

How does MP3 work?
MP3 reduces a CD audio file's size by as much as ninety percent, with an algorithm that eliminates sounds listeners are least likely to perceive — including extremes of high and low frequencies.

What is dynamic range compression?
This studio effect reduces the difference between the loud and soft parts of a piece of music — recently, mastering engineers have used it to make sure every moment on a CD is as loud as possible.

Want to see more? Make your own waveform comparisons and send the images to us here. We'll make a gallery and post in on RollingStone.com.

Planet of Sound: Loudness Resources on the Web

Turn Me Up!
This organization of producers and audio engineers wants to encourage artists to bring dynamic range back to music by certifying albums that comply with certain standards.

"The Loudness War," a YouTube video
This video explains why dynamic range matters in terms anyone can understand.

Loudness War entry, Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry on the "Loudness War" has solid, if slightly technical information about the conditions that have led artists and labels to limit the dynamic range of their music.

"Everything Louder Than Everything Else," Austin 360
This informative and well-written article was one of the first to address the lack of dynamic range in the mainstream media.

"Imperfect Sound Forever," Stylus
This magazine article about the "Loudness War" is full of interesting examples.

"Over the Limit," Prorec.com
This informative article uses graphics of waveforms from five Rush albums to illustrate the decline of dynamic range.

Hear It For Yourself
Here are three recent albums noted for their depth and dynamic range — and three that are way too loud

GOOD
Modern Times, Bob Dylan
Not Too Late, Norah Jones
Raising Sand, Robert Plant/Alison Krauss
On these albums, the music breathes: Check out the true-to-life sound of Dylan's "Thunder on the Mountain."

BAD
Alright, Still Lily Allen
Californication, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Infinity on High, Fall Out Boy
These are so unrelentingly loud that the sound is nearly distorted. The choruses on the Peppers' "Scar Tissue" are no louder than the verses.