Sound Level Monitoring at Live Events, Part 1–Live Dynamic Range

Abstract

Musical dynamics are often central within pieces of music and are therefore likely to be fundamental to the live event listening experience. While metrics exist in broadcasting and recording to quantify dynamics, such measures work on high-resolution data. Live event sound level monitoring data is typically low-resolution (logged at one second intervals or less), which necessitates bespoke musical dynamics quantification. Live dynamic range (LDR) is presented and validated here to serve this purpose, where measurement data is conditioned to remove song breaks and sound level regulation-imposed adjustments to extract the true musical dynamics from a live performance. Results show consistent objective performance of the algorithm, as tested on synthetic data as well as datasets from previous performances.