Darragh Winters
This project aims to make use of mono incompatibility in a creative way. To do this, the project makes use of phase cancellation and masking to put two different pieces of music within the same audio file. This allows the music heard to drastically change depending on if a stereo or mono device is used to listen to it. The project also investigates the use of mono and stereo devices by consumers.
Make use of mono incompatibility creatively.
Make pieces of music that have a significant change from listening in mono to listening in stereo.
investigate what devices people use to listen to music and how relevant mono devices currently are.
Three pieces of music were made
1. A piece that changes genre from rock in stereo to folk in mono.
2. A full orchestral arrangement in stereo is reduced to a single piano in mono.
3. A synth piece in stereo hides a spoken word message in mono.
To achieve complete masking of the mono pieces a test was carried out with several participants to discover the minimum volume difference needed between two pieces of audio for one to be completely covered.
It was also discovered that masked content has lower audio quality in Mp3 format, meaning the mono versions of the pieces provided here may have artefacts present.
A survey was done to investigate what devices people use to listen to music and what they hear when asked to listen to one of the pieces created.
This survey revealed that while majority of people use stereo devices the most to listen to audio, mono devices are still being used by some. This was further reinforced when 23% of people heard the folk song whilst listening to the provided audio, proving that they listened on a mono device as the rock song had been cancelled out by their device.
A brief questionnaire was given to mixing engineer "Kieran Lynch" to get a professional insight into the relevance of mono incompatibility and his approach to mono compatibility in the mixing process.
A thesis describing the research and techniques applied whilst creating the project artefacts and the results of listener tests and the mixing engineer questionnaire.
Student of Creative music production with a passion for studio engineering, mixing, mastering and compostition.
