Sound barrier

I had been waiting a while for it to happen, and happen it did last weekend. ‘Turn your music down,’ said my 11-year-old daughter from the next room.

I had been waiting a while for it to happen, and happen it did last weekend. ‘Turn your music down,’ said my 11-year-old daughter from the next room. ‘I’m trying to think.’ At last the generation gap has asserted itself. She does like some of my music, although she increasingly leans towards showtunes and has far more interest in classical music than I had at that age. ‘It’s too loud,’ she clarified.

I was playing the Pet Shop Boys’ latest album Yes (Parlophone), which is rather a dense production, courtesy of the naggingly successful production team Xenomania, the people who brought you Girls Aloud. Listen to their music on headphones and there’s simply too much to take in: trillions of guitars, keyboard lines, percussion, squeaky little noises, extra little tunes squeezed in between all the tunes underlying the main tune. Turn it down and it still sounds too loud, which seems to be the case with a lot of chart music nowadays. But that may just be my inner fogey talking. It occurs to me now that all music you dislike sounds too loud, unless it’s turned off altogether. There may be no silence in the world more pure and blissful than the silence created when someone switches off Radio 1.

But mainstream pop does seem to be going through a dense phase. There’s an awful lot going on in almost every record you hear. This may be a function of the available technology: if you have 72 tracks, or 144, or however many they have now, why not use them all? It may be that denser music sounds stronger on MP3 players, and certainly the fashion is now for music to be mixed ‘louder’ on CD than it was a few years ago.