Mastering is the last stage in a music production, and entails modifications of the music's spectral and dynamic properties. This paper presents the development of a set of semantic scales to characterize the (change in) perceptual properties of the sound associated with mastering. An experiment was conducted with audio engineers as subjects. Verbal elicitation and refinement procedures resulted in a list of 30 attributes. Next, 70 unmastered music segments were rated on scales corresponding to the attributes. Based on clustering and statistics of the responses, groups of similar and opposite attributes were formed. The outcome was a set of seven bipolar semantic scales. These scales could be used in semantic differentiation, to rate typical alterations of sound caused or desired by mastering.
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