Recently collected Spotify data illustrates how short our musical attention spans have become. Theres only about a 50% chance well actually make it to the end of a song. If people are barely listening to a song once all the way through, theyre likely not returning to build those emotional connections. If they do, they might not have a foundational experience on which to form them. Many music professionals have also discussed this lack of connection, and they blame the dwindling quality of audio files for it. When record companies digitally convert recorded music, which consumes a ton of data in its original form, they turn it into the much smaller MP3 format. But this compressing process strips about 91% of the actual musical data and fills in the gaps using algorithms. The volume is then jacked up to make up for this lack of distinctiveness, and the resulting waveform is barely recognizable. Not only that, it can actually exhaust your ears to listen to it. It ends up looking like a solid brick of noise, as the following portion of the infographic A Visual History of Loudness, created by designer Christopher Clark, shows.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 19:52:47 +0000