A case study of cultural influences on mixing preference — Targeting Japanese Acoustic Major Students

There is no clear rule in the process of mixing in popular music production, so even with the same music materials, different mix engineers may arrive at a completely different mix. In order to solve this highly multidimensional problem, some listening experiments of mixing preference have been conducted in Europe and North America in previous studies. In this study, additional experiments targeting Japanese major students in the field of acoustics were conducted in an acoustically treated listening room, and we integrated the data with previous ones and analyzed them together. The result showed a tendency for both British students and Japanese students to prefer (or dislike) the same engineers’ works. Furthermore, an analysis of verbal descriptions for mixing revealed that they gave most attention to similar listening points, such as “vocal,” and “reverb.”