{"id":1013,"date":"2010-01-18T16:08:57","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T23:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/16\/1013\/"},"modified":"2010-03-17T08:55:05","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T15:55:05","slug":"the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/18\/1013\/","title":{"rendered":"The Loudness Wars (and leaf blowers)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an earlier post complaining about excessive noise<\/a> I briefly mentioned the trends within music. The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR<\/a> has more interesting details on this include some real stats (sadly using only the top song from each year rather than some sort of average). There’s a Wikipedia article now, Loudness war<\/a>. Some more anecdotes can be found in an article from the Times Online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The comfort for me in all this is that people seem to be really realizing that this is a problem and ruining the quality of music, and so maybe we are or soon will hit a peak and then trend back to something more reasonable. Don’t even get me started on people using earbuds whose music can still be heard by others.<\/p>\n

Leaf Blowers<\/h3>\n

Last week I was also reminded of something that’s been bothering me for years, leaf blowers. I’d describe a leaf blower as something that accomplishes the same thing as a rake, but with the added benefit of costing more, taking much longer, requiring more effort, using gas or electricity (cost and pollution), and making a ton of noise. A quick search online for ban “leaf blowers”<\/kbd> shows that I am very far from being the only one with this opinion. It appears that a lot of people are working to get them banned, and in some places have succeeded. Let’s hope that spreads.<\/p>\n

I did my usual Facebook check and there are tons of anti-leaf-blower groups, with fewer than a couple hundred people in most of them. The Clean Air California<\/a> website seems to be aiming to ban them statewide or even US-wide. Here (sorta) in Toronto I see an article on a motion to ban them in 2007<\/a> which failed for what seems like pathetic reasons including industry lobbying, 6 years after the previous attempt to ban them.<\/p>\n

Looking at the leaf blower issue turned up the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse<\/a>, which seems to be perhaps the American equivalent of the Canadian advocacy site I linked to in my previous post. Last year I attended a lecture at Town Hall Seattle<\/a> by Gordon Hempton<\/a> who started the One Square Inch of Silence<\/a> project, not a bad idea but more significant for it’s symbolism than the one particular place. I don’t have any real conclusion here, I’m just complaining in my usual, not-really-doing-anything-about-the-problem way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post complaining about excessive noise I briefly mentioned the trends within music. The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR has more interesting details on this include some real stats (sadly using only the top song … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[657,655,415,504,654,656,503,505],"class_list":["post-1013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-gordonhempton","tag-leafblowers","tag-music","tag-noise","tag-noisepollution","tag-onesquareinchofsilence","tag-sound","tag-volume"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}