Abstract
In popular music productions, the lead vocal is often the main focus of the mix and engineers will work to impart creative colouration onto this source. This paper conducts listening experiments to test if there is a correlation between perceived distortion and the descriptor “aggressive”, which is often used to describe the sonic signature of Universal Audio 1176, a much-used dynamic range compressor in professional music production. The results from this study show compression settings that impart audible distortion are perceived as aggressive by the listener, and there is a strong correlation between the subjective listener scores for distorted and aggressive. Additionally, it was shown there is a strong correlation between compression settings rated with high aggressive scores and the audio feature roughness.
Highlights
A two-way repeated measures ANOVA was run to determine the effect of compression settings mean result for the descriptor aggressive with a 95% confidence interval for all three songs and all time and the interaction effect and compression settings of the two songs on perceived distortion
This paper has shown that professional engineers use the descriptor “aggressive” when describing
This paper has shown that professional engineers use the descriptor “aggressive” when the sound quality of compression techniques that distort the signal
Summary
In addition to general dynamic range control, it is common for music producers to use dynamic range compression (DRC) for colouration and non-linear signal processing techniques, to impart distortion onto program material. Bromham et al [17] looked into compression ballistics (attack and release settings) and how they affected the perception of music mixes in four styles: Rock, Jazz, HipHop and Electronic Dance Music They asked participants to rate which ballistic setting was the most appropriate for a genre and to select from a list of given words to describe the sound quality of their preferred setting. Work by Dewey and Wakefield [19] has shown that compression is one of the most used mixing tools and the present author’s experience as a music production academic and professional suggests that audio engineers and scholars are interested in the character of compression. The lack of work in this area is surprising
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