john

What is art? for me art is the intentional expression of creativity using skill within one or more media. Admittedly many remove skill or intention. Certainly something that doesnt employ skill, creativity or intention can be perceived artistically. The point is that commercial pieces can be just as artistic as uncommercial pieces. The distinction is in fact between art produced for yourself, versus art produced for a specifc audience or audience other than yourself. Of course you can produce art, including music, for both yourself and others... so it isn't necessarily black and white. What I often see being misunderstood is the wooly notion of "artistic integrity". The notion that somehow by producing commercial music it is either unartistic or that everyone who makes commercial music is unartistic, or has automaticallly lost their artistic integrity is something put forth by people jealous of the commercialsuccess of someone else's music, even as fans this can be felt. To me artistic integrity is compromised (if anything) when art is modified for commercial reasons only. Does thatmake the work artistically invalid? nope... or we would have no music industry! Is it wrong to make money from art? Not at all. Is it wrong to write something that has a popular appeal? no way. A writer can be self indulgent or not, but that is not the same as uncommercial versus commercial, artistic vs unartistic. It is something levelled at musicians... as if artists dont need to eat or pay bills. Next time a builder repairs by house and doesnt expect payment because he did it for the pure expression of his craft I must ask...

Welcome to Songstuff. Great intro and good question. we have both google visible and google invisible, though the standard critique boards are visible, it is possible to have private groups ( and boards belonging to the group) and coming soon there will be the ability to do so with private invite only blogs). We might however be making private services subscription only (private group or private blog) as a means to help pay for the site, but subscription price would be very low, under $5 a month bundled with lots of other benefits. This is not settled yet, nor a price assessed, so it may still end up being free or restricted to the invite only groups and blogs. either way we will soon have a decision. Many decision on the running of the site come down to needs and wants of our members. So if you see a need for a feature we do try to respond pretty quickly.

actually it is deliberate... they compress heavily to achieve a very deliberate increase in volume and loudness. Volume is definitive, but loudness depends on perception. in essence with a pure tone signal of -3 dB at 100 Hz will be perceived as 1000 times quieter than a pure tone signal of -3dB at 3kHz. This is because the human ear does not respond in a linear way to sound frequency... in other words our ears hear some frequencies better than others. In fact we don't really hear above 20kHz even when young... but the sound is still there, afterall dogs hear dog whistles don't they? The reason why compression makes tracks sound louder is that compression works across the entire volume spectrum (within circuitry restraints) meaning that at any point in time the difference between the highest volume and the lowest volume is reduced. In turn that means that more of the frequencies making up the sound are closer to the peak volume than they once were. Imagine you had 20000 speakers, each able to project a single frequency in Hz ranging from 1Hz to 20 kHz at a volume of -3 dBv (With respect to a reference voltage).. starting with one single speaker, turning each on one at a time... the volume is still -3 dB... but the perceived loudness will increase as each speaker is turned on. So to sum up, the perceived loudness of a piece of music depends on the frequency content of the music, how close each frequency is to the peak volume and where the frequencies are in relation to the frequency sensitivity of the human ear. Lastly, you can get compressors that can be tuned according to frequency... ie the amount of compression and boost applied depends on the frequency of the signal it is applied too. These don't tend to be cheap and there are far fewer on the market. Hope that helps.

Hey Daniel, welcome to Songstuff!

Welcome to Songstuff Jo