{"id":5312,"date":"2013-04-07T00:00:32","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T04:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=5312"},"modified":"2013-05-07T10:23:22","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T14:23:22","slug":"louder-than-war-are-movies-falling-into-the-same-loudness-trap-as-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/louder-than-war-are-movies-falling-into-the-same-loudness-trap-as-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Louder than War: Are Movies Falling into the Same Loudness Trap as Music?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Loudness_Wars_585x585-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the past few decades modern music has become victim to the age of digital audio production.\u00a0 Authentic sounds and instrumentation have been swallowed up by a polished gleam that renders the audio to a glossy and punchy finish.\u00a0 Loudness<\/i> has been the key to creating upfront and vibrant songs that at first sound exciting. By pitching the quieter moments within an audio track to a higher frequency, the song automatically becomes more urgent and distinctive.\u00a0 This slow change, orchestrated by producers and record companies, has been deliberately subtle, as if to allow listeners ears to adapt to the change in audio quality.\u00a0 This tampering in sound has had an unfortunate drawback for the listener.\u00a0 As producers up the volume within the audio track, listeners have had to reduce their own volume controls to a more comfortable volume, thus the song\u2019s initial spark and bluster is reduced to a whimper. This has led to a backlash from music fans who have become frustrated with their favourite artists manipulating their recorded sound.\u00a0 The most documented example of this was Metallica\u2019s 2008 album Death Magnetic<\/i> which was released as a CD version with dynamic range compression added (which pushes audio peaks beyond the point of digital clipping, causing distortion) and as a download and playable version on the popular video game Guitar hero III, <\/i>minus the compression. <\/i>Fans noticed a distinct clipping sound throughout the CD album, which prompted calls for a re-master of the original recordings to bring them to the same standard as the Guitar Hero<\/i> version.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In music, re-mastering and re-editing can at least be done to a reasonable standard. In film, excessive use of special effects, bad dialogue delivery and deafening soundtracks are harder to expel from a film, in fact they are more than likely to be added.\u00a0 Film is suffering its own Loudness War that strips away the authenticity, emotional and humanistic element and instead replaces them with digital layers of spectacle. \u00a0Once the audience choice for heart rendering and emotional substance, film is turning its back on the emotional aspect and looking to dazzle and confuse its audience with simplistic narratives, told with complex digital technology that only engages the audience on a sensory level.<\/p>\n

There has been much criticism aimed towards music production and the studio trickery employed to produce modern music.\u00a0 Auto-Tune, which digitally tampers with a vocal track to put it in tune, is basically a cheaters programme for any potential singer.\u00a0 The criticism mainly takes a swipe at the lack of authenticity that digital audio manipulation permits.\u00a0 Enhancing a singer\u2019s vocals or upping the volume of a song in order to give it more of a kick seems to strip it of its original substance.\u00a0\u00a0 Film on the other hand is often lauded for incorporating similar computer generated cheats that can spawn entire digital landscapes and impossible feats of the imagination.\u00a0 James Cameron\u2019s film Avatar<\/i> (2009) may have been criticised for its relatively light-weight story, yet it still dazzled its enormous world-wide audiences with a magical digitally created world and its alien inhabitants. \u00a0\u00a0Avatar<\/i> is an extreme example of the stripping away of humanity in film and the replacement of digital layers.\u00a0 The film\u2019s human actors were recorded delivering their lines using motion capture technology, and in post production the actors were replaced with their CGI avatars, a literal stripping away of humanity.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cameron describes Avatar\u2019s manipulation with childlike glee: \u201cIf I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature\u2026\u201d (Waxman 2007) and explained the method of design as a \u201cform of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements” (Fitzherbert, 2009).\u00a0 This godlike complex of digital creation is placing fictional creations before human emotion.<\/p>\n

Star Wars<\/i> director George Lucas is also guilty of dispensing with humanity in his films, the director\u2019s prequel trilogy is awash with CGI worlds populated with CGI characters that interact with the slim human cast.\u00a0 Even in a situation where actors are in conversation with each other, Lucas employs digital tricks to cut and paste an actor\u2019s best take with the other actor\u2019s best take.\u00a0 Here Lucas strips away natural human interaction and replaces it with stiff and artificial interaction.\u00a0 Lucas has continually added digital layers to his original trilogy, inserting CGI characters, artificial action (Greedo shoots first), and whole new backdrops to the original action.\u00a0 This has caused much uproar from fans of the original trilogy whose childhood imagination far outstripped the original film\u2019s technological shortfall.<\/p>\n

Not all have followed George Lucas and James Cameron\u2019s example. Christopher Nolen tried to fuse the scientific and humanistic with Inception. Inception <\/i>Incorporated dazzling action set pieces and stunning visuals with a dream narrative that challenged the audience\u2019s perception of reality and dreams.\u00a0 However, Nolen\u2019s attempt to bring a more thoughtful approach to big budget filmmaking was for the most part unsuccessful.\u00a0 Despite its impressive ensemble cast and witty dialogue, Inception<\/i> failed to garner a lasting emotional response from its audience.\u00a0 The mind-blowing effects and layered narrative stand like a fork in the road to an emotional response.\u00a0 Given that Nolen went out of his way to avoid using CGI, Inception<\/i> adds digital layers, dressed up as human created dreamscapes, to compensate for the lack of human substance.\u00a0 This is no fault of Nolen\u2019s directorial skills; this is simply audience expectation of how they now wish to be engaged by film.<\/p>\n

In his book Everything Bad is Good for You <\/i>(2008),author Steven Johnson makes a case for how modern popular culture is apparently making us smarter and more engaged.\u00a0 When compared to television, film and literacy culture from twenty or thirty years ago Johnson\u2019s premise is strong.\u00a0 We have, in the last ten years or so, seen an increase in complex plot narratives, that once lounged comfortably in film, infiltrating mainstream television. Johnson takes his examples from a wider spectrum of media, but focus primarily on the popular television dramas 24, ER, Lost, and The Soprano\u2019s<\/i>, as well as looking at comedy programmes like Seinfeld. <\/i>Since Johnson\u2019s book was published an array of other television drama has continued the trend of complex and multiple narratives that weave and thread from episode to season.\u00a0 Game of Thrones, The Corner, Boardwalk Empire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, <\/i>and even video games such as Grand Theft Auto, <\/i>all offer the audience an enormous amount of fat to chew on.\u00a0 Johnson points out that audience engagement with these programmes is paramount to giving the show mainstream appeal.\u00a0 Websites and blogs, magazines and television documentaries all vie to decipher the shows contents, narrative and dialogue, explain to casual viewers the heavy going dramas of 24\u2019s<\/i> Jack Bauer or the complex family values of Tony Soprano. Television is beginning to engage audiences on a cognitive level that satisfies the human emotional range more than film can. \u00a0Film is notable in its absence from Johnson\u2019s book as an example of how modern popular culture is engaging our brains.<\/p>\n

For decades popular film has offered only visual thrills and in the last decade, as digital technology has become more efficient and wide-spread,\u00a0 the thrill has been replaced with a deafening roar of excessive and baffling visual effects. An example of this can be found in the Michael Bay directed Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen<\/i> (2009), a film so riddled with visual CGI, the plot of the movie is drowned under a barrage of twisting and scattering metal contraptions battling each other for screen space.\u00a0 The image has been described as \u2026\u201dunrelenting. It’s easy to walk away feeling like you’ve spent 2\u00bd hours in the mad, wild hydraulic embrace of a car compactor\u201d (Sharkey, 2009).\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t stop with Transformers<\/i>.\u00a0 Films such as Battle: LA<\/i> (2009) and 2012<\/i> (2010), have been criticised for the extensive use of digital effects over human narrative.<\/p>\n

The difference between the Loudness War<\/i> in music and film is that music listeners are revolting against the manipulation of the audio and demanding authenticity to their music.\u00a0\u00a0 There is genuine campaigns battling the Loudness War<\/i> in music, and demands are being made by the listener to bands and artists not to employ audio fakery to enhance the bombast of a song (http:\/\/turnmeup.org\/<\/a>).\u00a0 The same cannot be said for the film audience.\u00a0 There are no active campaigns against the use of CGI, or visual manipulation in modern cinema; audiences are not demanding more engaging and complex narratives from major production studios.\u00a0 The only vocal concerns seem to stem from audiences of the original Star Wars<\/i> trilogy who feel their childhood memories are being tampered with by the excessive use of digital re-mastering and CGI additions to the original films. This seems to be a solitary campaign that only extends to three films in particular; no demands are extended towards any other film.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Modern blockbusters are lauded by critics and audiences for their use of digital layers, but this is strictly a visual compliment.\u00a0 The films fall short on an emotional level and offer only spectacle to compensate for the lack of humanity.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Stephen Lee Naish is the author of a short story collection called\u00a0The Wingman and Other Sketches<\/i>\u00a0and an as yet unpublished film criticism book called\u00a0Create or Die: The Lost Films of Dennis Hopper.\u00a0<\/i>His writing has appeared in the American arts and culture journals\u00a0Gadfly Online<\/i>,\u00a0Empty Mirror<\/i>,\u00a0Scholardarity<\/i>,\u00a0<\/i>The Fear of Monkeys<\/i>,\u00a0Mungbeing<\/i>\u00a0and the Australian arts magazine\u00a0Retort<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0He is British, but lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife Jamie and son Hayden.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Wingman and Other Sketches<\/b>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Wingman-And-Other-Sketches\/dp\/1471608506<\/a><\/p>\n

Create or Die: The Lost Films of Dennis Hopper<\/b>:\u00a0http:\/\/dennishoppercreateordie.blogspot.ca\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Other writing<\/b>:\u00a0\u00a0http:\/\/taoofsteve.moonfruit.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Contact<\/b>:\u00a0Steleenaish@googlemail.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past few decades modern music has become victim to the age of digital audio production. Authentic sounds and instrumentation have been swallowed up by a polished gleam that renders the audio to a glossy and punchy finish. Loudness has been the key to creating upfront and vibrant songs that at first sound exciting. By pitching the quieter moments within an audio track to a higher frequency, the song automatically becomes more urgent and distinctive. This slow change, orchestrated by producers and record companies, has been deliberately subtle, as if to allow listeners ears to adapt to the change in audio quality. This tampering in sound has had an unfortunate drawback for the listener. READ MORE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":5455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,218,201,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5312"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5583,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions\/5583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}