The Other Half
by rachMiel

Soft is beautiful. Think of an 80-voice choir singing unison at the level of a whisper. Or the delicate ringing tones of a piano’s highest octave played pianissimo. Fingers moving across steel guitar strings. Brushed hi-hat. A felt-more-than-heard low D bowed gently on a double bass. The highly expressive character of all these sounds is determined to a large extent by their low dynamics. Play them louder and the magic is gone.

Sadly, most forms of electronic music rarely visit the other (lower) half of the dynamic spectrum. Instead, composers take great pains to maximize the loudness of their pieces, and in doing so, to drastically reduce the dynamic range. Don’t blame compression for this; it’s a symptom, not the cause. Ditto for maximizers, optimizers, normalizers, etc. Instead, level your sights at the maxed-out volume demands of dance clubs, the über-compression of radio stations and record producers, and the most insidious culprit of all ... fashion: It’s just not considered very cool and sexy to make soft electronic music. What a shame.

There are exceptions. Ambient, glitch, downtempo, and trance all understand the power of dynamic understatement. lowercase embraces softness, revels in it. But, for the most part, volume begins at mf, not pp, and moves inexorably to the hallowed land of ff. The lower half of the spectrum is in danger of extinction. Help save it!