20 March 2008 @ 08:36 am
Well, probably not, but I've been offered a job at TV3. Wooo! Finally, the job hunt seems to be over.

And I have to laugh at how the government's only response to things they don't understand is to ban it or place warning stickers on it - Mp3 players 'destroying' your hearing. A big part of why listening to music for long periods of time on headphones is bad for you isn't even mentioned, presumably because no one involved in writing the story or doing the talking at parliament has ever heard of the 'Loudness War'. Basically, instead of listening to music which has troughs and peaks, meaning the loudest sections of the music are only heard for short periods of time - be it a few minutes, surrounded by quieter sections like Pink Floyd, or microseconds (yet still with variation) like the Beatles - people are listening to highly compressed modern pop/rock, for hours presumably, meaning everything is always the same volume - loud - and loud enough to drown out whatever it is they're avoiding by listening to music in the first place.

The very way in which the music is produced leads the ear to believe it's also more dynamic than it is though, so the effect can be hard to spot. In the "quieter" sections, it's not as compressed - doesn't need to be - but the signal level is just as strong. When it gets "loud", it can't actually get any louder, but it sounds more compressed - and the ear's natural compression (used to protect against unexpected, loud sounds like explosions and whatnot) detects this as being "louder" - much like an explosion still sounds loud to us, even if the ear has dampened its volume to protect itself. It causes fatigue in the ear, and some say this leads to damage being done easier.

If all headphones were noise-cancelling, people wouldn't turn them up so loud, and the problem would be largely erased. It would also help if music wasn't so compressed. It's okay as an aurally aesthetic choice if you want it to be, but it generally only works for singles - music designed to be listened to as a single piece, not in the context of a whole album. But people are listening to these single blasts of compressed pop all day long, at volumes to drown out their surroundings, which is causing the problem.

NOT Mp3 players themselves. Are they going to do the same thing to stereos and computers? And phones? And record players and television sets? Because they all have exactly the same capabilities to destroy your hearing as Mp3 players.