If the master is incredibly dynamic, I might not be able to hear everything that’s actually going on in the song. Let’s say I’m listening to a song on my AirPods on the subway while going into work. In contrast, in genres like classical and jazz, composers use dynamics to a much greater extent.Īnother wrinkle to note is that a master that has too much dynamic range may not translate well to certain consumer audio playback systems or listening environments. This makes a lot of sense-in genres like EDM, music is often meant to be as in-your-face as possible, pretty much all of the time. For example, pop and EDM tracks are typically louder than classical or jazz records. Different loudness levels are appropriate for different genres. That balance varies based on many different factors, with a primary one being genre. In practice, mastering is about striking the right balance between all of these. A good commercial master should be dynamic (if there’s no difference between the softest and loudest levels, the song will be basically unlistenable), but it should also be “loud” and “exciting” (or else it won’t hold the listener’s attention). If you’ve met an audio engineer, you know that we love to ramble on forever about dynamic range, or the difference between the softest and loudest levels in a piece of audio over a given time. This is one reason why we like louder sounds, and why a louder master can sound “better.” Our brains interpret sound based on signals sent by the vibrations of tiny hairs inside our ears called ‘cilia.’ The louder a sound is, the more it excites our cilia, which in turn means the sound is more exciting to our brains. But if you want to understand more about why you might want to master your music to a certain level (rather than how), read on. If you do want to master to a specified level, Ozone is an incredibly useful tool. In a previous post, we discussed how to master to a specific loudness target (in that case, Spotify’s recommendation) using iZotope’s Ozone 9. This number is constantly thrown around without much justification beyond the fact that it’s the loudness normalization target that Spotify cites. Illustration: Michael Haddad Let’s just get this out of the way: the answer to “How loud should I master my music?” isn’t always -14 LUFS.
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