Why do certain songs sound louder than others even when they’re played at the same volume?
In: Technology
FYI some PC audio applications like snackamp can take your audio library and “auto-level” them for you, do you don’t have to mess with the volume controls all the time.
Its the way it is produced. Imagine, different people speaking at a mic in an auditorium. Some may speak louder than others. Even though speaker volume is unchanged you can make out the difference.
While post production some may amplify a bit.
There’s an audio technique called levelling, where the overall average volume can be changed. Some CDs have different levels depending on the production values, and sometimes because the range of volumes in the music (loud vs. soft), more common in orchestral pieces. You’ll see levelling used on radio and TV stations, they use it to keep the audio low so that they can blare commercial sound, used to be a common tactic.
One thing to blame is the [Loudness War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war?wprov=sfti1), where producers mastered their albums to be louder on the radio than other songs.
They’re probably not actually at the same volume. If we record you whispering to me, and me yelling at you, and then play them both back at 100% volume, it doesn’t change the fact that we recorded you doing something quiet and me doing something loud – the playback volume may be the same, but the source volume is different.
[Perception of Loudness](http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~guymoore/ph224/notes/lecture13.pdf)
The frequency of a sound impacts its perceived loudness. Source: audiologist
* If one song has loud peaks every now and then, and another song has loud peaks all the time, the second song will seem louder even though the peaks of each song are the same level.
* Producers use a technique called “audio compression” to do this.
* Also TV and Radio stations use it too. They use it to make songs and commercials easier to hear in noisy environments.
Imagine two recordings of the same song: in the first, the singer was sitting right in front of the microphone; in the second, the singer stood 20 feet away from the microphone.
If played back at the same volume, which recording do you think would be louder?
The point is that the producer of any music has a lot of influence over how “loud” music will sound when you replay it. They can influence loudness of the recording you replay in any number of ways. Your volume setting has no bearing on their recording techniques or post-recording changes (usually with software) to the recording before it was delivered to you.
Think about recording into your phone, you can record a soft whisper or record yourself yelling. The yelling will be louder. The same can happen to music.
There’s a lot of answers on here about modern mixing/mastering, overuse of compression for publication, and all that stuff is accurate. But at the heart of the question, if you really do play two distinct songs (or sounds) at the same exact volume, you will hear certain frequencies clearer than others.
This is described by what’s called the Fletcher Munson curve, and is important for any audio engineer to understand: https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/fletcher-munson-curve/
Basically our ears are tuned to hear the frequencies around the human voice the clearest, and even if there are lower/higher frequency sounds at the same volume, you’ll hear the midrange vocal frequencies the clearest. This is used to certain ends in audio mixing, like electric guitar frequently has a big midrange spike so that it “cuts through the mix”
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