Be Here Loud: Rethinking the loudness war and its role in ubiquitous music through listening experience

Abstract

Throughout this thesis, I argue how the loudness war has affected our listening experience, through affect and attention, when listening to ubiquitous music. This is done in order to show that music is an ever changing activity. This means that how we understand music and consume it, can never be fixed. In the theoretical framework, the loudness war and ubiquitous listening are linked together through the concepts of listening experience and listening formation. The loudness war is a conflict in the ongoing history of sound reproduction where music is getting more compressed in order to achieve louder sounding music. This is in line with the demands of music consumers, but this goes against the grain of audiophiles. Ubiquitous music is a concept which says that music is becoming more ubiquitous and therefore requires a less attentive listening mode. Despite the fact that ubiquitous music requires less attention, it still produces affective responses. Listening formation ties this all together because it theorizes the shared listening experience. The case study of this thesis, which is a musical analysis, shows how the theoretical framework works in practice. Here, two albums of Oasis are discusses, first through contemporary reviews from 1995-2000. This is in order to show how music is generally reviewed and show the listening formation of the time that the albums came out. Secondly, I have showed my own listening formation by performing a new musical analysis. Because I am not a part of the same listening formation as the contemporary reviewers, my methods, observations and outcomes are different. All together this thesis shows how our understanding of listening experience affects our opinion on music