Auditory masking occurs when a sound is obscured by the presence of others. This can be either simultaneous or non-simultaneous. When masking occurs, the sound you wish to hear is called the target signal and the sound/s that is/are obscuring is/are called the masking signal.
Simultaneous masking is also known as frequency-domain masking or spectral masking. This is when two signals compete with each other in a similar frequency range at the same time.
Non-simultaneous masking is called temporal or time-domain masking. This is when two signals are competing with each other, but are not occurring at the same time. Temporal masking is particularly problematic between transient sounds (percussive sources like kicks, snares and claps). There are two varieties of temporal masking: forward and backward.
Forward masking is when the quieter target signal occurs after the masking signal; for forward masking to occur there needs to be less than 200 milliseconds between the sounds (although,...
When you are mixing it is easy to lose perspective on the track you are working on, it is also very easy to put the listeners focus on elements of the mix that were designed to be more texture or backing parts. Due to this and many other reasons, it is important to be able to return to a more “objective” state. Utilizing roughs mixes and commercial referencing are great ways of being able to quickly analyse your mix direction and to also “reset your ears”.
When a piece of music is being recorded there will always be some sort of vision. It is the mix engineer’s job to take the raw recording and make it sound as good as it can, whilst retaining the vision set forward by the producer. Some styles of music and its arrangement will mean that it is a straightforward task to match the mix to the vision, for instance, a classic punk track would be very difficult to misinterpret (provided you know the remits of the genre in the first place). However, a...
To understand why mixing on headphones is difficult we need to understand what happens to sound in a real room environment.
In a real room sound reflects around the room boundaries or any physical objects in that room so when a sound leaves a speaker it doesn't just go to the listening position it just bounces around everywhere and those reflections
changes the perception of the sound at the listening position.
Simplified example of sound reflections in a control room.
On headphones that doesn't happen the sound is literally directly coming out of the drivers of the headphones and directly into your ear.
This means that you are getting absolutely zero reflections from the acoustic environment and this makes listening on headphones a completely different experience to listening on speakers.
To be able to make good mixing decisions the acoustic environment has to sound good and a lot of people have acoustic environments that are sub-optimal and a bad...
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