“Salience” from a music production perspective This is a presentation of the preliminary results of observations in mixing sessions about what producers and mixing engineers regard as the most noticeable features of the music they are working on for the listeners.
I will present results from three cases, where I observed mixing sessions in two contrasting genres and interviewed a mixing engineer about a past mixing session. The aim is to delineate what producers and mixing engineers intended to bring forward in the piece of music that they were working on. This will hopefully shed light on salience in works of phonography from a production perspective.
One of the preliminary results indicates that music creators in some genres rely more explicitly on the listeners’ frame of musical reference to be able to communicate certain "prioritized" features of music.
The study is part of my PhD-thesis in progress, where I apply the concept of salience to music analysis, specifically to analysis of works of phonography.The thesis investigates what musical properties or events are the most functional, or account for the coherence, in these works from both production and reception perspectives. This presentation is about the preliminary results of the former.