The recording is basically a set of information density states expressing various information polarities over time. The information is the audio and with higher information density comes more perceived music out of the audio. This music expresses the combinations of the expressions of the being of the creative artists under the influence of the song, the production context etc. The question is, how do you boost the perceived musical qualities of a recording, is it possible and how is it done?
I tend to agree with the Grammy nominated recording engineer Dave Moulton that the music creation process is an emotion filter and you want to ensure as little of the emotion as possible is filtered out during the music creation and recording process. But in my view this determines only parts of the music potential, because if you have only a single polarity within a very high information density, you have a lot of depth into a very specific and narrow portion of the total available sea of emotional information. For example even if you would express only pure love in a recording, you might describe maybe just a very specific kind of love that in absolute terms is just a fraction of the total love. So understanding what the richness of music is, that is in my view similar to looking at a rainbow, the rainbow in its totality is the beauty, the rainbow does not express this beauty only in black and white colors, or because a specific color is present within it. The richness comes from the amount of polarities within the rainbow, red vs blue, black vs white, green vs. yellow or however the individual colors express their polar opposites. It is the polarities we are dealing with when we enrich the music qualities of audio. When the information density drops, the polarities drop out of the audio, it is similar to having a rainbow that you remove colors from.
So in my view the first thing to be aware of when we aim for creating great music, is that a low information density means lack of polarities, less emotional richness. If such a recording hits mixing and mastering, we can try to add certain colors to it to try to bridge the gap and we should as soon as we have decided there is enough information density in the recording that it is possible to bridge the remaining gap much enough, but it is still important to understand that the bulk of the information density creation happens prior to the mixing and mastering processes.
Many producers and engineers that work with music tend to wonder why it sounds like it does at the end, many times loudness is the perceived difference according to the engineer's explanation, but that is a highly over simplified explanation. The better and more underlying reason is in my view simply put the lack of music present in the audio, a lack of resolution/information density. This phenomenon can be understood by comparing the beauty of two video steams produced by cameras at totally different quality and price levels. If the camera only records black, you will have no perceived difference in quality between the two results produced by the two cameras. But when you bring in more and more colors into the video recording, the final perceived difference in beauty and quality grows exponentially.
I tend to agree with the Grammy nominated recording engineer Dave Moulton that the music creation process is an emotion filter and you want to ensure as little of the emotion as possible is filtered out during the music creation and recording process. But in my view this determines only parts of the music potential, because if you have only a single polarity within a very high information density, you have a lot of depth into a very specific and narrow portion of the total available sea of emotional information. For example even if you would express only pure love in a recording, you might describe maybe just a very specific kind of love that in absolute terms is just a fraction of the total love. So understanding what the richness of music is, that is in my view similar to looking at a rainbow, the rainbow in its totality is the beauty, the rainbow does not express this beauty only in black and white colors, or because a specific color is present within it. The richness comes from the amount of polarities within the rainbow, red vs blue, black vs white, green vs. yellow or however the individual colors express their polar opposites. It is the polarities we are dealing with when we enrich the music qualities of audio. When the information density drops, the polarities drop out of the audio, it is similar to having a rainbow that you remove colors from.
So in my view the first thing to be aware of when we aim for creating great music, is that a low information density means lack of polarities, less emotional richness. If such a recording hits mixing and mastering, we can try to add certain colors to it to try to bridge the gap and we should as soon as we have decided there is enough information density in the recording that it is possible to bridge the remaining gap much enough, but it is still important to understand that the bulk of the information density creation happens prior to the mixing and mastering processes.
Many producers and engineers that work with music tend to wonder why it sounds like it does at the end, many times loudness is the perceived difference according to the engineer's explanation, but that is a highly over simplified explanation. The better and more underlying reason is in my view simply put the lack of music present in the audio, a lack of resolution/information density. This phenomenon can be understood by comparing the beauty of two video steams produced by cameras at totally different quality and price levels. If the camera only records black, you will have no perceived difference in quality between the two results produced by the two cameras. But when you bring in more and more colors into the video recording, the final perceived difference in beauty and quality grows exponentially.
Last edited: