Sound Judgements: Music Education Framework for Guiding Digital Mixing Practice

Mixing is an intermediary process within audio production wherein the aesthetic and technical qualities of musical compositions are further enhanced and refined. Most music perceived via audio-playback devices is mixed to sound a certain way. By understanding why recordings ‘sound’ how they do, musicians, music educators, and novice mixers can acquire a greater appreciation for mixing while considering how this process might affect their own performance practices (Hodgson 2019; Fisher, 1998). Knowing how and what to listen for when mixing is highly subjective, as people experience and describe sounds differently. Indeed, mixing is illusory as listeners are presented with an apparent single acoustic phenomenon (the mix) with all the sounds blended to complement one another to sound aesthetically pleasing. This study introduces readers to a flexible music education learning framework involving principles, guidelines, and strategies which students and music educators of secondary and post-secondary levels may refer to when learning to mix. Such a framework outlines ways of listening, evaluating, and mixing sounds through reiterative decision-making processes. The researcher’s purpose of this study was to engage firsthand in mixing practice through autoethnography to experience, explore, and document the craft’s musical potentialities. One of the researcher's primary goals as a novice mixer was thus to make musical arrangements ‘sound better.’ It is what constitutes ‘better’ that makes studying mixing practice mysterious and highly subjective, although mixing processes also involve objective, numerical, and scientific values (i.e., Hertz frequencies, decibels, etc.). Among the significant findings of the study were important insights into the elusive mixing goals of improving the ‘musicality’ of arrangements and exploring the skills and competencies necessary for students to learn how to mix with a technical and aesthetic mindset. Cultivating a sense of musicality within mixes is difficult, enigmatic, and an utmost mixing goal due to the lack of ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions and the accessibility of mixing tools. Beginners might be overwhelmed if not provided with a learning framework for mixing that includes helpful guidelines and possible strategies to make sense of what they see, hear, and can do musically.