This research explores the common belief that the settings of artificial reverb and delay time in music production are strongly linked to musical tempo and related factors. Two subjective tests were used to evaluate user preference of young adults with formal training in audio engineering on artificial reverberation and delay time. Results show there is a clear relationship between musical tempo and delay time preference, but reverberation time preferences cannot be explained in this way. Post-test interviews with subjects helped explain that the setting of reverberation time is seen as too multidimensional to be correlated to a single factor (namely song tempo) because stylistic attributes and song genre have a bearing on user’s choice. However, results still seem to indicate that even if song tempo is not the main correlate, there may be other low-level factors that strongly explain this variable.

Authors: Pestana, Pedro Duarte; Reiss, Joshua D.; Barbosa, Álvaro
Affiliations: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, CITAR, Lisbon, Portugal; C4DM, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK; University of Saint Joseph, Macau, China(See document for exact affiliation information.)
JAES Volume 65 Issue 1/2 pp. 100-107; January 2017
Publication Date: February 16, 2017 Import into BibTeX
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18547

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2016.0061

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