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This is the home of award-winning composer and designer Jamie Klenetsky. Here, you will find Jamie's compositions and performances, web/graphic design portfolio, and biography. Jamie's blog, detailing her music, web, and personal lives, is below.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Loudness Wars

A very good article from NPR, including a great poster describing the problem.

Basically, the more you compress sound, the more subtleties are lost. Sound is a wave, and the further you compress a sound wave, the "chunkier" the wave gets. Instead of a smooth line, imagine it as a series of rectangular bars that try to approximate the curve (the poster describes it better than I could).

This has been a problem for years. The more acoustic the recorded medium, the more of the wave is preserved. So records are less compressed than CDs, for example, though CDs still retain most of the quality. As audio equipment has improved, you can hear the flaws in an old recording, but if you listen to a record on a record player, the nuances can be incredible.

As the 90s went on, sound engineers began compressing the sound more to boost the volume. Imagine a horizontal line on a piece of paper. The sound wave would be say, a third up on the paper. To boost the volume, the wave ends up covering say 2/3 of the paper, even the entire paper. The wave itself becomes less detailed as a result.

The digitalization of music is a huge problem in terms of sound quality. Like the article says, when sound waves have to be translated as 1s and 0s, the wave becomes even more "chunky", and a ton of quality is lost. It gives the music a kind of unrealistic quality that's subtle, you might not notice it offhand.

It's an interesting problem and a real one - check out the article for more details.

Labels: sound

posted by Jamie at 11:02 AM 0 Comments

Monday, January 4, 2010

New Year's Resolutions

Hi everybody! It's been awhile since I've posted.

The New Year has got me thinking. 10 years ago, I was 15 years old, first starting to obsess over web design, and writing songs. Things haven't changed too much have they - I'm a web designer for a living and compose (and sing and play video games, also the same as 15 years ago). However, I have one resolution in this regard:

compose and design just for fun.

I find it very hard to just sit down and compose or design just for myself. 10 years ago, I used to write songs all the time and make a number of layouts for my many sites, one every two weeks, or at least once a month. I changed my blog layout frequently and learned a lot about designing.

I don't think I'll ever match that productivity (or should), but I'd like to take the pressure off of myself to produce, and just have fun with it. I might change my personal blog layout more, and will hopefully mess around with electronic music more, just for fun.

Wish me luck :)

Labels: fun