An empirical approach to the relationship between emotion and music production quality
This addresses the problem of understanding emotional engagement in music production for mix engineers and listeners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research with a small-scale empirical test.
The study investigated how music production quality affects emotional responses, finding that high-quality mixes had a greater emotional impact on critical listeners compared to non-critical listeners, with significant differences in responses for high-quality mixes.
In music production, the role of the mix engineer is to take recorded music and convey the expressed emotions as professionally sounding as possible. We investigated the relationship between music production quality and musically induced and perceived emotions. A listening test was performed where 10 critical listeners and 10 non-critical listeners evaluated 10 songs. There were two mixes of each song, the low quality mix and the high quality mix. Each participant's subjective experience was measured directly through questionnaire and indirectly by examining peripheral physiological changes, change in facial expressions and the number of head nods and shakes they made as they listened to each mix. We showed that music production quality had more of an emotional impact on critical listeners. Also, critical listeners had significantly different emotional responses to non-critical listeners for the high quality mixes and to a lesser extent the low quality mixes. The findings suggest that having a high level of skill in mix engineering only seems to matter in an emotional context to a subset of music listeners.