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Why is the world losing color?

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322 points trevin | 4 comments | 02 Apr 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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crazygringo ◴[02 Apr 25 16:38 UTC] No.43558560[source]▶
It's not "losing" color.

At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.

But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.

Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.

I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.

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bongodongobob ◴[02 Apr 25 17:24 UTC] No.43559067[source]▶
You can see the same thing in music recordings during the 60s. Stereo and quadrophonic sound was new so everything was panned all over the place really hard. Drums all on the left, vocals hard right etc. It's an interesting effect sometimes, but generally a gimmick and/or distraction. We don't really do that anymore, for good reason.
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1. jntun ◴[02 Apr 25 17:45 UTC] No.43559255[source]▶
Because the analog equipment back then could only do binary panning.
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2. wholinator2 ◴[02 Apr 25 17:52 UTC] No.43559326[source]▶
I've heard this is a recommended paradigm for mixing, to only ever pan things R, C, L and nothing in between, but it doesn't make sense to me. Possible because i have to mix on headphones, but it sounds much too extreme to me. Sure, _some things_ can go all the way but i generally enjoy to fill the space between the far edges, and allow some reverb busses to blur the lines a bit if needed.

Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down

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3. ricardobeat ◴[02 Apr 25 18:03 UTC] No.43559460[source]▶
That’s totally not true. The original stereo patent from the 1930s is based on M+S signals, not separate channels, and was born out of a desire to position sound across a stage (movies).

By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.

4. bongodongobob ◴[02 Apr 25 19:27 UTC] No.43560548[source]▶
No, that's complete nonsense.