Welcome to my brain. Or at least the part of my brain which deals with HIST 390: The Digital Past in the Fall of 2018 at George Mason University.

I’m not sure what to think of this class yet. Hopefully I’ll get a feel for it in the coming weeks and find it valuable to my education.

This week’s topics of conversation were the “loudness war,” compression of music to make it all the same volume, the changes in how and why we listen to music, and whether technology enriches or impoverishes our lives.

I understand the concept of compression, but I don’t understand why it is happening in modern music. Who began compressing music? What was the though process behind making music more “processed” and less “natural?” If a singer is singing low to moderate in their range, the volume should be rather soft. If they are singing with great emotion or very high in their range, the volume rises. If more instruments join the piece, the volume should increase. These sound changes are natural in the making of music. So who decided to take this element away from music?

Professor O’Malley credited an author for using the example of bread to explain the process of compression. Real bread is amazing. Creating a starter using ground wheat and water begins the fermentation process. You feed the starter everyday to keep the process going. Then you create your dough and do bulk fermentation. Then you shape your loaves, make cuts, let them rise one last time, and bake. You have a perfect loaf of nutritionally dense, fermented, delicious bread. So, why does Wonder Bread exist? Its flour is bleached and stripped of nutritional value to create a longer shelf life. The nutrients are pumped back in artificially, there are a bunch of weird sweeteners in it (why is bread sweet?), and it just tastes bad. People buy it and they don’t make their own bread. Why?

We can relate this to compression of music. Why is this new (and bad sounding) way of listening to music taking over the music scene when the original method was far better? We buy it, we listen to it, we like it.

I have one idea as to why this is happening to music. I’m not saying it’s accurate or is the entire explanation, but I think it may be part of the explanation.

Consider Wonder Bread again. When Wonder Bread first hit the shelves, people weren’t necessarily making their own bread all the time. Slowly, Americans became busy enough and wealthy enough to outsource this labor-intensive task to a company who sells it to the grocery store. A delicious (but not really) loaf of bread could end up in the houses of American families for a small sum. What happened to the small companies that made bread once Wonder Bread popped up in stores? Their sales probably plummeted. There is a cheaper bread on the market that lasts longer and is advertised heavily using amazing marketing techniques. Wonder Bread set the new standard: cheap, fluffy, long-lasting, decent enough to eat, and oddly enough, American. What do the others do? Either attempt to make a case for why their product is better or more natural, or change to the new way of making bread and probably make a lot more money.

This system sucks, but it’s something we see all the time in America and the world. The question becomes: why do we accept the bad thing in the first place? If people had tried Wonder Bread and decided that it tastes awful and never bought another loaf, they would have gone out of business a long time ago. But for a long time we thought we were ahead of the world by making things cheaper, less environmentally-friendly, and worse in quality. The middle class of post-WWII America created this trend.

I am pleased to see that trend reversing. Millennials in particular are finding ways to return the the more natural way of doing things, and realizing that it is better most of the time. Of course I’m not suggesting an extremely “natural” lifestyle is a good idea (I’m talking to you, antivaxxers), and sometimes these people may come off as annoying “hipsters.” But I think we’re on to something, or at least I’m hopeful. I will add that consumers are very powerful creatures. If something needs to be changed and you mobilize enough people to not buy it till it’s fixed, those trends are scary to companies (think rBST in milk products – it’s essentially gone because enough people stopped buying milk). If music compression is protested enough, it’ll be gone soon.

Music is a huge industry and everyone in it wants to keep making money. If the idea of music compression hits the headlines and permeates social media, I think it’s all over for that compressed garbage we currently listen to.

-Jessi Russell