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hubie writes:

Lead Vocal Tracks in Popular Music Go Quiet:

A general rule of music production involves mixing various soundtracks so the lead singer's voice is in the foreground. But it is unclear how such track mixing – and closely related lyric intelligibility – has changed over the years.

Scientists from the University of Oldenburg in Germany carried out an analysis of hundreds of popular song recordings from 1946 to 2020 to determine the lead vocal to accompaniment ratio, or LAR. Their results appear in JASA Express Letters, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, and show that, contrary to expectations, the LAR for popular music decreased over the decades in question. This means that, relative to their bands, lead singers are getting quieter.

An earlier study suggested that lead vocals were mixed at a higher level than other instruments, but it looked at songs that were not fully representative of popular Western music. The current study rectified this by considering the four highest-ranked songs from the Billboard Hot 100 chart for each year from 1946 to 2020.

[...] "Our analysis showed a significant downward trend in the LAR from about 5 decibels in 1946 to approximately 1 decibel in 1975, after which time the LAR remained constant," Gerdes said.

The investigators wished to determine whether LAR values changed over time to improve the intelligibility of lyrics or if changes in music technology were involved. Electrical amplification of instruments might, for example, be a factor, as could multitrack and stereophonic recording technology. They found that changes in music technology appear to be behind the observed decrease in LAR until 1975.

"Another possibility involves the stylistic evolution within popular music," author Kai Siedenburg said.

Journal Reference:
Karsten Gerdes; Kai Siedenburg; Lead-vocal level in recordings of popular music 1946–2020 [open], JASA Express Lett 3, 043201 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017773

Original Submission

If you felt that you couldn't understand indie/grunge 90s rock vocals, that apparently was by design:

Beck spoke with NPR to give his own insight on the volume knob turning down over the years.

"I came up more in the indie rock genre, alternative music. And the ethos of that time was to really bury the vocal ... You didn't want people to hear what you were saying."

The track and the rhythm has to be at the forefront if you want to move people. As soon as you put the vocal up at the forefront, the track loses its energy and its immediacy and it becomes something else, which is why I think it suits jazz or folk.

But the minute you do that on a pop song, you kind of lose people in that connection to feel the energy of a track ... It loses a kind of visceral immediacy that people are conditioned to, and it will make the song kind of feel a little dull.

So now we're in this kind of arms race of audio and sound and volume to get these tracks louder and louder. So, yeah, now I think we're at a point where, for the most part, it's the beat, a little bit of vocal, and maybe one little element of music in there. You know, this is a long way from the world of [The Beatles'] Sgt. Peppers, where there are orchestras and sitars and a million other sonic colors happening.