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from the your-lips-move-but-I-can't-hear-what-you're-saying dept.
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
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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 17, @12:27PM (2 children)
With the rise of styles like mumble rap where the lyrics are barely intelligible, or K-Pop where the lyrics can be heard but are in Korean so most English-speaking fans don't understand them, the pop music industry has learned that the words aren't all that important. Plus, thanks to electronic processing and lip-syncing, being able to sing is pretty much optional for pop stars these days.
What is incredibly important, of course, was that a significant percentage of the audience wants to bang the performer. The model of "pretty face on whatever old guys like Max Martin and Doctor Luke decided to come up with this week" is a proven winner, so that's what the industry wants.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday May 17, @08:40PM
Definitely not REM [youtube.com] and that's awesome!
This discussion reminded me of the mis-heard lyrics site [kissthisguy.com], and I thought I'd look for that tune there since it's so mumbly, but I guess it's so hard that most people don't even try.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday May 18, @01:48PM
I was thinking this was more of a way of working around how god awful so many of the modern lead singers are. It used to be that they'd find somebody that had the right sound, then just do the recordings. Later, they looked for somebody with the right look and sound, and trained the rest. Now, they just look for the right look and to hell with any of the other considerations. Reducing the volume of the lead singer, autotuing the crap out of them, makes it a lot less obvious to unsophisticated audiences that the lead singer can't sing.
It used to take a genius producer to get something good out of a bad singer. Now, they can make just about anybody sound good with the tools available. With AI powered tools, I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before it doesn't even take a decent producer and to do it in real time for concerts.