Responsive image

An approach to assess loudness and dynamics with Web Audio native nodes

Sebastian Zimmer
Music content providers on the Internet like YouTube1, Spotify2 or Apple Music3, as well as a range of software playback systems like the media player “foobar2000”4 have a loudness normalization feature to match a series of diverse audio tracks in overall loudness. This is done to keep perceived volume differences between audio tracks as low as possible. Thus, it is important for music producers, especially mastering engineers, to master audio tracks with a particular amount of dynamic range, so that streaming services will not turn the playback volume of their tracks down. With their already low dynamic range, a listener would now even better be able to recognize their inferior sound compared to other tracks with higher dynamic range. To correctly assess the dynamics of audio material, this paper introduces two web applications that compute and visualize the loudness and dynamic range of audio material, using a subset of the loudness units described in the recommendation R 1285 by the European Broadcasting Union6, and using only native notes by the W3C Web Audio API7.
            
@inproceedings{2017_EA_73,
  abstract = {Music content providers on the Internet like YouTube1, Spotify2 or Apple Music3, as well as a range of software playback systems like the media player “foobar2000”4 have a loudness normalization feature to match a series of diverse audio tracks in overall loudness. This is done to keep perceived volume differences between audio tracks as low as possible. Thus, it is important for music producers, especially mastering engineers, to master audio tracks with a particular amount of dynamic range, so that streaming services will not turn the playback volume of their tracks down. With their already low dynamic range, a listener would now even better be able to recognize their inferior sound compared to other tracks with higher dynamic range. To correctly assess the dynamics of audio material, this paper introduces two web applications that compute and visualize the loudness and dynamic range of audio material, using a subset of the loudness units described in the recommendation R 1285 by the European Broadcasting Union6, and using only native notes by the W3C Web Audio API7.},
  address = {London, United Kingdom},
  author = {Zimmer, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Web Audio Conference},
  editor = {Thalmann, Florian and Ewert, Sebastian},
  month = {August},
  pages = {},
  publisher = {Queen Mary University of London},
  series = {WAC '17},
  title = {An approach to assess loudness and dynamics with Web Audio native nodes},
  year = {2017},
  ISSN = {2663-5844}
}