The Second International Conference on Music Communication Science, 3-4 December 2009, Sydney, Australia http://marcs.uws.edu.au/links/ICoMusic09/index.html AUDIO MASTERING: EXPERIMENTING ON THE CREATIVE SYSTEM OF MUSIC PRODUCTION Bryan Paton and Phillip McIntyre School of Philosophy, Monash University and School of DCIT, University of Newcastle. ABSTRACT If creative productivity emerges from human interactions and these interactions are increasingly mediated by technologies it should be possible to seek empirical confirmation that specific technologies contribute, in whatever degree, to the creative output of particular forms of cultural productions. To test this idea the contention of this paper is that one should be able to detect a differential response to a recorded piece of music that has been mastered, from a piece of music that is un-mastered, at the point of audience reception. Audience response was measured on three emotion scales and it was confirmed that responses did change dependent on whether participants were listening to un-mastered or mastered versions of the same recorded piece. 1. BACKGROUND To gain an insight into the relationship between technological manipulation and creative output an understanding of what has already been learned about creativity itself at the rational or theoretical level and an application of these ideas to a specific circumstance of technological contribution at the empirical level would need to be considered. The current academic research into creativity has moved a great distance beyond the Romantic conception implicit in most common understandings of the way creative works come into being (Boden, 2004; Negus & Pickering 2004, Pope, 2005; Sawyer, 2006). The discipline of psychology has recently produced a number of confluence models of creativity that suggest creative activity comes about through a multifactorial process (Sternberg, 1999). One of these confluence models, produced in the discipline of psychology i.e. the systems model of creativity (Csikszentmihaly, 1988), asserts that rather than creativity being the result of the work of a single individual genius it arises out of the complex conjunction of a number of psychological, social and cultural factors that operate in a systemic way to produce creative works. It can be seen that the process used to create, in this case, recorded musical works is most often a collaborative and systemic one with each step in the recording process adding something of creative value to the final work the audience hears. In this regard, Peter Wicke has argued that: “music as the individual expression of an outstanding artistic personality is de facto impossible. [Music has become] a collective means of expression, to which the individual musician can only contribute in a collective activity with others” (Wicke, 1990) and this is intimately connected to the recording process. The community of personnel involved in this collaborative process includes not only the musicians and producers but also the technicians who control and manipulate the studio technology in the process of record making (McIntyre & Paton, 2008). Those technicians who work with the technological dimensions of the recording process are called engineers. Their roles have become so important to the creative process that record engineers can now be distinguished from mix engineers and mastering engineers all of whom perform different functions in the recording process. From pre-production to production to post-production each step in the recording chain changes the final product slightly. It follows that the creative work each of these engineers are involved in should therefore have an impact on the reaction the audience has to that piece of music and be discernible in some way by that audience. The claim here is that not only will the captured or constructed performance by the musicians influence audience reaction but so too will how the recording is mixed and, for the purposes of this paper, the manner in which it is mastered. The Mastering Process. Mastering, according to Bob Katz, is the ‘last creative step in the audio production process, the bridge between mixing and replication (Katz, 2002). As outlined in McIntyre & Paton (2008) the mastering process is ‘the stage of post-production where the overall final product is adjusted so that it is intelligible, in audio terms, across all playback systems and, in this case, may be compared to the colour grading process undertaken in film work’ (2008). This process involves not only track assembly and editing, but also equalisation, a variety of dynamics processing, level matching and track coding. These processes offer the ‘last chance to enhance sound or repair problems in an acoustically-designed room – an audio microscope’ (Katz, 2002) prior to the tracks being manufactured for delivery to an audience. As Don Bartley one of Australia’s leading mastering engineers claims ‘definitely, you can make a difference (Bartley quoted in McIntyre & Paton, 2008). The Relationship Between Music and Emotion There is considerable evidence to support a strong link between music and emotion (Rawlings & Leow, 2008; Juslin & Sloboda, 2001; Sloboda, 1991). We can already distinguish a large number of frequencies at birth (Lecanuet, 1996) and we quickly learn to localise sound sources based on auditory cues. The sense of hearing