Abstract
Objective measurement of perceptually motivated music attributes has application in both target-driven mixing and mastering methodologies and music information retrieval. This work proposes a perceptual model of mix clarity which decomposes a mixed input signal into transient, steady-state, and residual components. Masking thresholds are calculated for each component and their relative relationship is used to determine an overall masking score as the model’s output. Three variants of the model were tested against subjective mix clarity scores gathered from a controlled listening test. The best performing variant achieved a Spearman’s rank correlation of rho = 0.8382 (p < 0.01). Furthermore, the model output was analysed using an independent dataset generated by progressively applying degradation effects to the test stimuli. Analysis of the model suggested a close relationship between the proposed model and the subjective mix clarity scores particularly when masking was measured using linearly spaced analysis bands. Moreover, the presence of noise-like residual signals was shown to have a negative effect on the perceived mix clarity.
Highlights
Terms such as ‘clarity’, ‘punch’, ‘warmth’ and ‘brightness’ are semantics often used to describe perceptual features found in musical mixes
The model consists of a median filter-based separation system, which feeds the MPEG Psychoacoustic Model II used to calculate signal-to-mask ratios of the component parts which were compared
Each variation was evaluated through both Pearson and Spearman’s rank correlation to subjective scores gathered in a controlled listening test. Their response to an independent dataset of stimuli degraded though the addition of pink noise, reverberation, and clipping was evaluated
Summary
Terms such as ‘clarity’, ‘punch’, ‘warmth’ and ‘brightness’ are semantics often used to describe perceptual features found in musical mixes. These features are often subconsciously combined by a listener when assessing the overall quality of a musical mix. Other similar definitions can be found in the literature, for example [7,8,9,10,11] None of these definitions are uniform in wording, they have a similar focus on the separability of the component parts of the mix, such that each part is distinctly audible. Understanding the underlying related signal characteristics of these perceptual features facilitates the proposal of formalised definitions
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