Brickwalling In Katy Perry's Teenage Dream

When flipping through radio stations trying to find that one perfect song you want to listen to. You may notice the when seeking through these channels the music really pops out at you and grabs your attention due to how much louder that piece of music is. Music producers want to get people’s attention, they want people to listen to their music and be like “Wow, man, this is some good music!”. Music producers implement a controversial technique entitled “brickwalling”. Brickwalling is essentially making digital music louder by using a limiter to remove quiet peaks and bumping them up in volume. Brickwalling can also be entitled to the name of dynamic audio range, which is a measurable feature. As time goes on, the average dynamic audio range

If you look at Table 1. You can see the different artists, their albums, the date the album was issued, along with the average dynamic range of the album. The average dynamic range is, in short, a math calculation between the highest and lowest point (in decibels) of a song. Now looking at the table, we can see that an in-your-face artist such as Led Zeppelin has a dynamic range of DR11, on his album “Mothership”, but what we can compare this score to is Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”, as it earns a bland score of DR6 (table 1). The fact that Led Zeppelin’s 2007 album is much more quieter than 2010’s hit album by Katy Perry, shows a direct correlation between the trend of making music louder. Another piece of music that we can look at is the album “Shakedown Street” by the Grateful Dead which was released first in 1975. Now we can compare this album to the re-release, which was released in 2006. The original scored a DR15, while the re-release, scored lower at DR11. That was why it was called a re-release, and not a re-mastered album. Now we can definitely see that there is a correlation between the release date of music and how generally loud it

If we look at the waveform of a piece of music we can we see where it peaks and goes soft. First to summarize what we are looking at, there is more than one audio signal as it displays the left and right audio waves. We are looking at the pure sound waves of the song, if you were to zoom in you’d see what would respectively be the sound wave. The ideas that we can interpret from this data is the fact that Green Day’s “American Idiot” is obviously more louder than an early song by Guns n’ Roses. We can tell it’s louder because the whole audio signal is compressed, much more waves hit the top, and there is no room for the music to