Perceptual evaluation of music mixing practices

The relation of music production practices to preference is still poorly understood. Due to the highly complex process of mixing music, few studies have been able to reliably investigate mixing engineering, as investigating one process parameter or feature without considering the correlation with other parameters inevitably oversimplifies the problem. In this work, we present an experiment where different mixes of different songs, obtained with a representative set of audio engineering tools, are rated by experienced subjects. The relation between the perceived mix quality and sonic features extracted from the mixes is investigated, and we find that a number of features correlate with quality. 1