Does room ambience have advantages over artificial post processed vocal ambience for recorded lead vocals in lowdynamic music : a preliminary study

This senior thesis examines if there are any advantages to using room ambience over post processed vocal ambience for recorded lead vocals in low-dynamic music. The thesis contains a literature review, an analysis of the techniques of several recording engineers and a listening test. The literature review examines the use of effect on vocals in music. The technique analysis makes use of published interviews from the book, The mixing engineers handbook by B. Owsinski, examine the common practice of mixing low-dynamic and is based on the interviews. The results from this analysis produced the mixing constraints for the mixing of the stimuli’s for the listening test. The listening test evaluates five different environments in which vocals have been recorded. The five subjects in the listening test have all a technical audio education. All environments have different acoustical characteristics and include: a church, a song booth, an entrance hall to an apartment, an anechoic chamber and a post processed song booth with ambience effects. The results from the listing test show indications on how humans perceive room size and offer insight into the positive and negative affects of the perceived room size, the amount of volume, intelligibility, reflections and which one of the environment are most and least preferred and why. The conclusion of this thesis is that preliminary findings suggest that there could be an advantage of using room ambience over post processed ambience on lead vocals.Validerat; 20101217 (root