In no particular order, a few things struck me during our discussion of loudness and the decline of midrange heavy music:

I like to think that I know about a lot of different music, and I might know a good deal about music, but I have a severely limited understanding of the vocabulary of production and loudness. Probably 80-90 percent of the music I’ve listened to since listening to music became a thing a do was in mp3 form. I live loudness. I had to get used to the more dynamic ways that records from the 60’s and earlier (and maybe a little bit of the 70s) were recorded because they sound smaller, even though they sound warmer and communal. So I can’t really adequately critique loudness because I like full sounding music. I listen to flac files because you can turn them up louder without hearing distortion in the track. But I also recognize that many songs are absolutely robbed of anything interesting when all the sounds are compressed to the same loudness. But those songs are also often not that interesting to begin with.
This brings me to my next thought: defending modern pop against the accusations of vapidity and decline. I don’t have the heart to do that, except as an academic exercise. I generally agree that something about modern music suggests a sad social shallowness, but I’m unsure of how much of that argument can be triangulated in the issue of loudness. I think our best shot at that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the brain automatically prefers loudness. Music, then, can be understood as a pavlovian feedback loop. I think many people agree that the “hook” is generally considered the most exciting and memorable part of the song, and it’s also often the loudest. Perhaps the whole song being elevated to the loudness of the hook is the only way to keep up the human pleasure response to loudness that must diminish everything we hear a loud hook. I think loudness acts as a drug with diminishing returns, so what was loud enough for one generation simply won’t do it for the next. Hence dubstep.

OF course, there is still no real value judgment inherent in that statement. It takes more skill to craft a dynamic son with an actual loudness payoff in the hook, but a good hook still has to have s melody. Perhaps understanding art as a function of skill and not as a function of the response it elicits (even if it is pavlovian) is misguided. I’m not a Poptimist, though,* so I generally accept the condemnation of loudness as another piece of evidence in the argument against the single-focussed, mass production music machine of the present.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/the-pernicious-rise-of-poptimism.html?_r=0