Although audio mixing has always been viewed as the artistic task of either a conductor balancing the musicians in a live performance or a mixing engineer combining multiple tracks in a sound studio, this research considers mixing as a mathematical optimization problem. Using an auditory model, the authors demonstrated how numerical optimization can be used to pose and solve a mix problem. There is interplay between artistic objectives, perceptual constraints, and engineering methods. Taking loudness as an example, it is shown that the nonlinearity in the perceptual model leads to complex behavior, which can be overcome by careful choice of optimization strategies and parameters.

Authors: Terrell, Michael; Simpson, Andrew; Sandler, Mark
Affiliation: Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
JAES Volume 62 Issue 1/2 pp. 4-13; January 2014
Publication Date: February 3, 2014

Download Now (172 KB)

This paper is Open Access which means you can download it for free.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.