Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 2 May 2022 at 09:23:10 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> Sometimes artifacts sound "good", be it for cultural or 
> "objective" reason.

Yes, this is true. Like, the loudness-competition that lead to 
excessive use of compression (multiband?) and ducking (to let 
bass drum through) lead to a sound image that was pumping in and 
out. I personally find that annoying, but when you see kids 
driving in the streets playing loud music they seem to favour 
this "musically bad" sound. I guess they find excitement in it, 
where I think of it as poor mastering. And I guess in some genres 
it is now considered bad mastering if you don't use excessive 
compression.

I believe this loudness-competition and "overproduction" also has 
affected non-pop genres. If you get the ability to tweak, it is 
difficult to stop in time... I frequently find the live 
performances of talented singers on youtube more interesting than 
their studio recordings, actually.

The french music scene might be different? French "electro" 
seemed more refined/sophisticated in the sound than many other 
"similar" genres, but this is only my impression, which could be 
wrong.

> Many small delays can help a voice "fit in the mix", and 
> spectral leakage in a phase vocoder do just that. So some may 
> want to come through a STFT process just for the sound of 
> leakage, that makes a voice sound "processed" (even without 
> pitch change). Why? Because in a live performance, you would 
> have those delays because of mic leakage.

I hadn't thought of that. Interesting perspective about mics, but 
a phase vocoder have other challenges related to changing the 
frequency content. How would you create a glissando from scratch 
just using inverse FFT, it is not so obvious? How do you tell the 
difference between a click and a "shhhhhhh" sound? The only 
difference is in the phase… so not so intuitive in the frequency 
domain, but very intuitive in the time domain. You don't only get 
spectral leakage from windowing, you also can get some 
phasing-artifacts when you manipulate the frequency content. And 
so on…

But, the audience today is very much accustomed to electronic 
soundscapes in mainstream music, so sounding "artificial" is not 
a negative. In the 80s you could see people argue seriously and 
with a fair amount of contempt that electronic music wasn't real 
music… That is a big difference!

Maybe similar things are happening in programming. Maybe very 
young programmers have a completely different view of what 
programming should be like? I don't know, but I've got a feeling 
that they would view C as a relic of the past. If we were teens, 
would we then focus on the GPU and forget about the CPU, or just 
patching together libraries in Javascript? Javascript is actually 
quite capable today, so…

> The phase-shift in oversampling? It can make drums sound more 
> processed by delaying the basses, again. To the point people 
> use oversampling for processors that only add minimal aliasing.

I didn't understand this one, do you mean that musicians 
misunderstand what is causing the effect so that they think that 
it is caused by the main effect, but instead it caused by the 
internal delay of the unit? Or did you mean something else?

> Plus in the 2020s, anything with the sound of a popular codec 
> is going to sound "good" because it's the sound of streaming.

I hadn't though of that. I'm not sure if I hear the difference 
between the original or mp3 when playing other people's music 
(maybe the hi-hats). I do hear a difference when listening to my 
own mix (maybe because I've spent so many hours analysing it).