[LESS INFO] 8 VIEWS | ADDED 17:37:36 12/03/10
In the future, the whole human race is deaf. A ragtag band of outcast scientists discovers this is because people were pressured to play their music louder and louder until our sense was absolutely destroyed.
Apathy remained consistent and despite the well-meaning words of doomsayers, almost everyone didn’t give a damn. (Or couldn’t escape the peer pressure of “being like everyone else”.) Hearing loss rates in pre-teens surged dramatically, around which time other sensory forms of communication became more popular. Even the new generation was going, “What? I can’t hear you!” like the elderly they had previously mocked.
Eventually, it got so bad that babies were subject not to lullabies, but walls of noise that would render their tiny ears useless when being in the womb.
The words “loud” and “soft” were removed from languages. Long-term evolution caused post-human ears to shrink and disappear entirely. There could be speculation about a mythical “fifth sense”, but aside from the outcast scientists, no one’s ever heard of it before.
Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi on Compression and the Loudness War in Mastering (via ArtistsHouseMusic )