Research Update Jan 2024
Research Update Jan 2024
Hi All!
I know I have mentioned the words “research”, “phd”, “study”, A LOT without much context of what I am doing, why I’m doing it, and how. Well, now that I’m three months in and have some initial data collected, I finally feel like I can start sharing this journey without it sounding like complete excited word vomit (although I will treat this post like a thought dump lol)
For some background, in grad school, I studied binaural mixing of popular music. Between 2015 and 2017 (before the Atmos boom lol) I was really interested on how we could implement binaural audio on popular music consumption. I found psychoacoustics, 3D audio formats, and 3D recording techniques absolutely fascinating thanks to my professors and peers. Having done that research I wanted to get some real work in the industry. I’ve always been genuinely motivated to balance academic knowledge with industry practice. And oh boy, did I get industry practice. I don’t think I slept between 2015 and 2021.
Now with some solid industry experience and an immersive audio takeover in our industry, I’m revisiting a similar topic with specific goals. First off, I’m really interested in studying Melodic Rap, not only because its a genre that I have worked in a lot, but because modern rap/hip hop doesn’t get enough attention. Outside of social and urban contexts within musicology, we don’t see a lot of folks giving it attention - and it deserves it! It is a popular music genre and many of today’s top of the charts artists have released music that fits that the style. I think a lot of studies that are in immersive mixing or binaural mixing treat popular music as one giant genre and we should be more specific with our approaches - which is where my study comes in.
If you have completed my first PhD study, then you’ll understand now why I asked about your perceptions of the genre. Not only am I doing an objective approach to this study, but I want to understand listener expectations of the mixes. This is so that I can later apply psychoacoustic principles to build upon these expectations and maximize on mixes in immersive formats. The songs that were named will be studied by me and will also be analyzed using a machine learning approach. Both the subjective and objective data is going to inform the next steps of this study towards building a more refined immersive mixing approach. Get in touch if this interests you!
Christal
