During the so called “Loudness Wars” artists actively sought means to render their recordings as loud as possible, at times exceeding the medium’s limitations. This paradigm conforms to an underlying belief that listeners consider louder music, both preferred and perceived, as sonically superior to that which is softer. This process has been described as the “louder is better” paradigm. Historically, loudness has been utilised as a mechanism to influence consumer behaviour, taking advantage of the non-linearity of the human hearing mechanism. Described by a leading figure as the “destruction of an entire musical heritage” (Lund i/v, 2015), hyper-compression presents one of the most challenging issues facing Western mainstream popular music in the 21st Century.
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