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Automated Multi-Track Mixing and Analysis of Instrument Mixtures

Published: 03 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Access to hardware and software tools for producing music has become commonplace in the digital landscape. While the means to produce music have become widely available, significant time must be invested to attain professional results. Mixing multi-channel audio requires techniques and training far beyond the knowledge of the average music software user. Achieving balance and clarity in a mixture comprising a multitude of instrument layers requires experience in evaluating and modifying the individual elements and their sum. Creating a mix involves many technical concerns (level balancing, dynamic range control, stereo panning, spectral balance) as well as artistic decisions (modulation effects, distortion effects, side-chaining, etc.). This work proposes methods to model the relationships between a set of multi-channel audio tracks based on short-time spectral-temporal characteristics and long term dynamics. The goal is to create a parameterized space based on high level perceptual cues to drive processing decisions in a multi-track audio setting.

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R. Izhaki. Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices and Tools. Elsevier Ltd., 1 edition, 2008.
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B. Pardo, D. Little, and D. Gergle. Building a personalized audio equalizer interface with transfer learning and active learning. In Proceedings of the 2nd International ACM Workshop on Music Information Retrieval with User-Centered and Multimodal Strategies, pages 13--18, New York, USA, 2012. ACM.
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E. Perez-Gonzalez. Advanced Automatic Mixing Tools for Music. PhD thesis, 2010.
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J. Scott and Y. E. Kim. Analysis of acoustic features for automated multi-track mixing. In International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Miami, Florida, 2011.
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J. Scott and Y. E. Kim. Instrument Identification Informed Multi-Track Mixing. In International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Curitiba, Brazil, November 2013.
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
MM '14: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Multimedia
November 2014
1310 pages
ISBN:9781450330633
DOI:10.1145/2647868
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 November 2014

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Author Tags

  1. automatic mixing
  2. clustering
  3. instrument mixtures
  4. multi-channel audio
  5. timbre

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  • Research-article

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MM '14
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MM '14: 2014 ACM Multimedia Conference
November 3 - 7, 2014
Florida, Orlando, USA

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MM '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 55 of 286 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,145 of 8,556 submissions, 25%

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