Does room ambience have advantages over artificial postprocessed vocal ambience for recorded lead vocals in lowdynamic music: a preliminary study
Abstract: This senior thesis examines if there are any advantages to using roomambience over post processed vocal ambience for recorded lead vocals inlow-dynamic music. The thesis contains a literature review, an analysis ofthe techniques of several recording engineers and a listening test. Theliterature review examines the use of effect on vocals in music. Thetechnique analysis makes use of published interviews from the book, Themixing engineers handbook by B. Owsinski, examine the common practice ofmixing low-dynamic and is based on the interviews. The results from thisanalysis produced the mixing constraints for the mixing of the stimuli's forthe listening test. The listening test evaluates five different environmentsin which vocals have been recorded. The five subjects in the listening testhave all a technical audio education. All environments have differentacoustical characteristics and include: a church, a song booth, an entrancehall to an apartment, an anechoic chamber and a post processed song boothwith ambience effects. The results from the listing test show indications onhow humans perceive room size and offer insight into the positive andnegative affects of the perceived room size, the amount of volume,intelligibility, reflections and which one of the environment are most andleast preferred and why. The conclusion of this thesis is that preliminaryfindings suggest that there could be an advantage of using room ambience over post processed ambience on lead vocals.
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