For the first week of class, The Digital Past, we talked a lot about the change in music production-wise regarding compression. From my understanding of compression, it is used to bring volumes, both loud and soft, to the middle ranges. As a result the music tends to be all one volume, despite changes in dynamics with the voice or instruments. When a singer sings a soft verse and moves to a chorus in which she is belting, although her volume and dynamics have changed drastically, the compression makes it so that the song plays at one constant volume. The listener doesn’t have to change the volume in order to hear soft parts, and turn down the song once a loud part comes on.
In our class discussions we talked about why there has been a shift between using no compression, to using heavy compression in most modern music. People in the class tended to agree of the hypothesis that heavy compression made it easier to listen to. I would agree with this because you don’t have to worry about the volume, or trying to hear the lyrics. Another reason that was brought up, was the music industry’s attempt to differentiate themselves in the digital age from competing sounds and advertisements. I also thought this was a good point as well because I believe that music has evolved in a lot of ways to fit how “in-your-face” modern advertising has become. I think that we are used to heavily compressed advertisements and lots of them, spaced in-between songs on the radio, Youtube, and Spotify. To keep up with ads, it is in music’s favor to compress their production and keep up with the volume wars so that music is not drowned out or quite when next to other sounds sharing its airtime.