Loudness Standards

Humans have a natural tendency to find music to be better when it’s louder, for instance many concerts will have unnecessarily loud music beyond the purpose of having it loud so that everybody in the audience can hear it. Some studies have shown that loud music made hearts beat faster and blood pressure go up, while softer passages lowered both heart rates and blood pressure (EDELSON, n.d.). This means that loud music often creates a more entertaining experience for particular audiences and could be described as having more of a thrilling sound that is more likely to get people motivated and excited. This is likely why most genres of music such as rock or harder styles of EDM will often have songs and live shows that will appear to be much louder sounding than lets say something such as classical music, which also ties in as the loudness of the music suits the characteristics and energy within the genres (such as metal being generally fast and heavy, therefore louder and classical music being more mellow and softer therefore quieter).

(Laumann, n.d.)

We can see in the graph above according to a study and survey that people prefer optimum listening levels of music such as Hard-Rock, Club (As this is an international study I would assume this is meaning club music) and Hip hop to be at a higher level compared to genres such as Classical or Folk. As seen in a few studies it can be shown that people tend to prefer music that is louder, but what does that really mean?

Loudness is more of a subjective term in the audio field which refers to the intensity of an overall sound rather than how loud it is in volume. Humans ears often respond to loudness in music in regards to the overall loudness of a song and rather the peak loudness, this being said the more compression of a dynamic range being brought up in mastering the ‘louder’ the song is going to sound. Record labels eventually took notice of the difference in volume that would appear in tracks and how on the radio one song would sound particularly louder than the next and therefore become much more distinguishable. This led to what is referred to as the loudness wars, the loudness wars are essentially where record labels would start to push the overall perceived loudness of their tracks up which in turn would crush the dynamic range of the track. A primary example of the peak of this is with the masters of Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s records where the waveform can visually be seen to have very little dynamic range.

These days things are much more cohesive in creative media platforms and in saying that many of these platforms have created loudness specifications for their platforms, this is particularly common in those that specialise in music streaming. Take Spotify for instance, Spotify as a platform doesn’t want it’s users to be constantly changing the volume of their playback because each engineer is trying to be louder, so they’ve created a limiter at a certain threshold and whatever master track goes over that limit suffers distortion issues. This doesn’t apply to peaks in the audio however, but rather the loudness is measured in LUFS, which stands for Loudness Unit Full Scale. Loudness units analyse the level of average loudness over the course of the song and makes the reading through there, that way it gives us a reading of the perceived loudness rather than the loudest part of the track. When a track goes over the threshold set for LUFS, the track will be condensed as mentioned earlier. This actually changes from different platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music or even on Youtube, luckily I’ve come across a chart which compares some of the major platforms, and their target LUFS.

(Shepherd, 2015)

This is an important process to notice for audio engineers and artists releasing music as the track will have to be mastered so that it has a LUFS that sits near the target LUFS of the platform otherwise the uploaded material may be altered.

Thanks for reading!

Bibliography (References):

EDELSON, E. Music Can Make the Heart Beat Faster. Retrieved 23 August 2019, from https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=7902380&page=1

Laumann, K. Loudness Evaluation of Various Musical Genres and Types of Listening Behavior.

Shepherd, I. (2015). Loudness online - how loud is loud enough, and how loud is too loud ? [Updated] - Production Advice. Retrieved 23 August 2019, from http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness

Other Research:

https://tom.video.blog/2019/08/19/loudness-standards/

https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mixing/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html

https://youlean.co/loudness-standards-full-comparison-table/

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=7902380&page=1

http://www.sandymilne.com/op-59-and-loudness-standards-for-australian-tv/

https://www.sltinfo.com/loudness/

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/louder-always-better

https://www.mixonline.com/recording/why-louder-sounds-better-373768

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/what-is-lufs-and-why-should-i-care/

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/loudness/

https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same

http://huffingtonpost.com.au/2014/07/02/deep-bass-sounds-music-rhythm_n_5548301.html

https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/mixing-and-mastering-using-lufs

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Music-Loudness-War-Alternative-Mix/idi-p/124162