The Loudness War is a result of artists wanting to make their music stand out by artificially increasing the volume of their recordings. This makes the music stand out on the radio and sound better on the more standard – rubbish quality – laptop speakers most people will listen to music on these days. It’s achieved by increasing the average volume of the recording, which itself is often achieved by compressing the dynamic range. The image below shows the effect of successive increases in the volume on the waveform of Something by The Beatles. You’ll note that by 2000 the waveform has been pushed to the point where it is nearly hitting the limits of what is possible in the recording format. Probably the most famous example of where this has been pushed too far is the Metallica album Death Magnetic. This image shows two versions of the song My Apocalypse. The top is that from the CD release, the lower is from the Guitar Hero version. Note that the CD waveform has actually been pushed to the point where it is clipping on the edges of what can be stored in the digital format. This kind of waveform results in audible artifacts, or distortion. Laughably the version from Guitar Hero (which was mastered separately) has been shown much more care and as such is actually the superior recording. It brings me much joy to imagine Lars Ulrich in a recording studio repeatedly saying “No, we need more volume. Louder…louder!”.

Back on point, the beautiful thing about the production of The Destruction of Small Ideas is that they took all of this into account. This means that the album has a fantastic sound. The quiet moments are really delicate and the difference between these moments and the loud moments is astounding. It offered what should have been the perfect rebuttal to the continual pushing of the Loudness War. Instead people were left disoriented by something which was produced in a slightly different way. If we take a quick look at the waveform for one of the songs from the album we can clearly see that a greater range of volume levels are being utilised.

Yes it still has loud sections, but these are contrasted with just about everything in between. This is in sharp contrast to the Metallica track in which the dynamic range of had been throttled out of existence, similarly the multiple increases in volume of releases of Something by The Beatles would have a similar effect. It’s something which I would really like to see less of, but I’m not entirely sure the music industry is willing to go that way. Hopefully artists will continually make a deliberate retreat from the front lines of the Loudness War. It’s a battle that has already resulted in at least one major casualty, the production quality of which was criticised far beyond the realms of the hardcore music fan.

I wonder why on earth anybody round here had a dot matrix printer they were still using though?

That will be all.

Here’s where a personal confession comes in, I actually arrived an hour late as I’d forgotten to change the time on my alarm clock when the clocks went forward. Normally I would’ve found this out long before, but seeing as this was the first week of my study break I hadn’t set my alarm at any point. Some quick footwork was required to minimise any time lost, luckily the event was in an area of Edinburgh I know reasonably well and managed to find pretty quickly. Sadly this delay did mean that I missed Norm’s talk on “The browser and before” which I’d been really looking forward to. My previous experience of Norm at the Yahoo Hackday at Dundee Uni led me to believe he’s an excellent speaker, and all round nice guy, what I caught of his Q & A session confirmed this.

I did however managed to catch Chris Heilmann’s talk “Sharing the joy – building badges for distribution” which again was an excellent talk filled with interesting information. I won’t cover this talk in detail as I’m going to be embedding the slides below, however there are a few things I want to mention as well. The main points of note from Christian’s talk were the ideas of separating data from the traditional page format, making data more readily available for users in a format they appreciate (minimal or no branding), additionally he considered how to achieve this while maintaing good search engine lovin’. There were some fascinating slides on progressive enhancement, in particular only loading badge images if they are visible, only loading a placeholder on page load. This should minimise pointless HTTP requests for badges when they aren’t in the viewport. See the slides below for more detail on his talk.

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Next up was Gareth Rushgrove who gave a fascinating talk on being “A First Class Web Citizen.” The talk covered a lot of aspects, but the ones in which I was most interested were URLs and APIs. Gareth stressed the importance of making URLs prod-able, so that if you play around you can easily find yourself at another page of use, without having had to navigate through the page structure. Last.FM is a reasonable example of this, you can prod your way to anybody else’s profile from your own. He also stressed that APIs should be easy to understand and use, and in a theme re-occuring from earlier in the afternoon suggested that APIs should also be seen as another user interface.

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Next up, Chris Mills from Opera came to give “The Mobile Perspective.” This was a very interesting talk for me, as I’ve never really considered the mobile market in terms of the internet. It turns out there are a number of things to take advantage of in the area, in particular CSS3 Media Queries to get the width of the browser window and tailor your content accordingly.

This was followed by a fascinating talk on Flash by Aral Balkan. The talk was entitled “Bare-Naked Flash” and did a great deal to convince me of the benefits of Flash. Aside from answering ever question the audience had, before his Q&A session, Aral Balkan did a good deal to dispel the myths surrounding flash, in particular that Flash is 99% bad. This last point included an amusing section of slides involving Jakob Nielsen and a Llama. Still I was enthused enough to consider looking into Flash again in my spare time, in particular the related Flex and Air technologies.

Finally we come to Simon Willison’s excellent talk on Comet. This was either called “Comet: Moving Towards A Real-Time Web” or “Comet: Real developers fight browsers with their bare hands!”. This was an entertaining and informative talk, with the complicated subject matter played for laughs, but covered in enough detail to get you started with Comet if you desire to do so. Essentially Comet is a really cool technology which allows real-time collaboration to happen much more easily. It involves the server pushing out new data to all clients as soon as it becomes available. Additionally there is an epic battle betwen Zepellins and Pterodactyls in which the Pterodactyls emerge victorious (just read the slides).

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Overall it was an excellent day, and I certainly intend to attend the event again next year should the opportunity arise. Now, if only I had time to play around with all the new things I learned about. One last thank you has to go to my University which payed for a good deal of the ticket price, I wouldn’t normally have been able to attend, but they made it possible.

One presentation really turned me on and piqued my interest. This session was probably the most technical of the lot, but even then it didn’t actually go in depth. What it did offer up however was a sense of the challenge involved in the area the company was working in. Additionally they were kind enough to give a very good idea about the type of company they were, and the hours of work expected. I suppose if you aren’t a computing person, you probably don’t get why that’s important but historically computing jobs have involved quite long hours of work. Needless to say I spoke to this company after the session to get an idea of what exactly they’d expect from a graduate and to get an idea of what sorts of things would help an application to that company be considered really seriously.

The next session I want to talk about was less than enticing. This session didn’t make any mention of trying to make an interesting prodcut. Instead it focussed solely on how the comapny could find new areas of exploitation, new ways to make money, new ways to involve advertising. Frankly it made me feel sick. I understand that business is business, but when you want to attract people to your company you surely at least want to give them an idea that you are making an interesting, worthwhile product. Instead we were treated to a presentation which stressed money above all else.

The final two sessions of the day had some issues as well. These were panel sessions, the first was a relatively dull afair “Is it a man’s world?” I wanted to shout out “Just look around the room.” Personally it’s a simple issue, most women don’t want to go into computing; fewer still want to go into gaming. There’s no problem within the industry, enough women make it to important positions within developers to suggest that there is no discrimination issue, but put simply far less women than men want to go into the profession. This session, and the one that followed, were not helped by the man that chaired the sessions. It’s probably a personal preference, but I got the feeling I wasn’t the only one that didn’t appreciate his sense of humour. Indeed I sensed he was making a number of the panel members rather nervous as they didn’t really want to be associated with some of his “funny” comments.

Overall though it was an excellent event, and one which I certainly intend to attend next year. I can’t stress enough how interesting and informative I found all but that one session. Maybe it’s just me but I’m really turned off by that sort of talk. I like to hear about products; more particularly I like to hear about a product that is designed either to help people, or to allow people to have fun. When it’s pruely business, I’m not impressed at all.

In the meantime I’m going to work away on some demos which I can hand out, hopefully I’ll impress a potential employer there. This work will hopefully be a subject for another day.