Hierarchical Perceptual Mixing
Alexandros Tsilfidis, Charalambos Papadakos, John Mourjopoulos · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2009
A novel technique of perceptually-motivated signal dependent audio mixing is presented. The proposed Hierarchical Perceptual Mixing (HPM) method is implemented in the spectro-temporal domain; its principle is to combine only the perceptually relevant components of the audio signals, derived after the calculation of the minimum masking threshold which is introduced in the mixing stage. Objective measures are presented indicating that the resulted signals have enhanced dynamic range and lower crest factor with no unwanted artifacts, compared to the traditionally mixed signals. The overall headroom is improved, while clarity and tonal balance are preserved.