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Music
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Playing musical instruments and recording songs has been my hobby for years.
I play the piano and constantly learning the guitars, the bass and the drums.
Sound engineering, mixing and mastering have recently drawn my attention and since
then I have been getting to know the magic of music production.
Some recent songs are available on
my SoundCloud page.
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Mixing Automation: a Problem for Research or Industry?
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Being an “automation” guy in my professional career and having passion to music,
for many years I am obsessed with the idea of automating the sound mixing process.
Let me explain it briefly.
One of the most tedious works a sound engineer has to do is to mix the
audio tracks for different instruments/voices into one master track.
This is because you (or the band) typically record the piano, guitars, drums,
any other instruments and vocals onto separate tracks, process and apply effects
independently to each track, and finally merge all tracks down to a single mix.
These are the steps modern musical industry applies to make the best of your recording
and squeeze attractive sound out of your mix.
And here comes the need for the experience and magical ears of sound engineer.
He or she has to detect and cut competing frequencies to make the mix sound clear,
compress it to make the sound loud (and hence more attractive to people’s ears) yet spacious enough,
avoid distortions, reduce noises and add dynamics. The mastering process follows to improve
the sound quality, but it is the matter of mixing that essentially defines the success
of the overall track quality. That is why the art of mixing is so highly valued.
The (wrong) question is:
“Can computer-aided automation substitute an experienced sound engineer?”
And the answer is: “Very unlikely.”
Now, the question is:
“Can automation efficiently help sound engineer with his/her work?”
My feeling is that the answer to this question is “YES”.
Imagine, what a computer could effectively do is to perform a thorough analysis of
the time/frequency characteristics of the mixed tracks, try the available effects,
work within the constraints specified by the sound engineer,
and apply given metrics to optimize the quality of the mix.
Still, the questions are: how to perform the analysis, how to express the user constraints,
and what are the optimization metrics? Well, the research guys have to do their job.
I anticipate criticism from those experienced in mixing of complex classical/jazz patterns… right.
Probably, you won’t get an awesome mix of a symphony orchestra with a single run of your
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
But many artists would benefit from a program compiling a fairly sounding demo in a couple of minutes.
And many sound engineers would benefit from one producing a starting point for their mix.
To the best of my knowledge, this direction is completely novel for music industry.
None of the dozens of DAWs available nowadays offer any mixing automation capabilities.
If you are interested in this topic or working on a similar project, please contact me:
I’d be very interested in collaboration, both professionally and in my spare time.
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Writing Mood
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A couple of poems (in Russian!):
Íîâûé Ãîä
Ìû ïîåäåì òóäà, ãäå ðàçâîäÿò ìîñòû...
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