“Mixed” Results: An Introduction to Analyzing Music Production through Eight Commissioned Metal Mixes

This article introduces music theorists and analysts to aspects of audio engineering and production that are widely transferrable within popular music. We reflect on why analyzing sound and its production is useful, followed by a case study of “In Solitude,” an originally written and produced five-minute song that was mixed by eight of the world’s leading metal music producers spanning several generations. In this case study, we demonstrate how analysts can roughly map aspects of loudness onto a virtual soundstage that helps sensitize listeners to subtle, but consequential, production nuances. To explain how this virtual space works, we guide readers through psychoacoustic relationships of width, height, and depth. Using these concepts and their relationships to (psycho-)acoustics, we show how the participating producers variously manipulate listener impressions of a virtual soundscape. Not merely limited to environmental impressions, these production decisions reflect broader aesthetic trends related to subgenre expectations in metal. We hope this case study serves as a primer in helping popular music analysts include audio engineering in their analyses. Such work does not need to reinvent the wheel radically; it can integrate production qualities into traditional observations such as harmony, melody, rhythm, and form. We argue that the producers’ timbral nuances reflect and inform the norms and expectations of individual subgenres as they exist on the record, the definitive text within popular music. Accordingly, analysts might ask how those norms are served or thwarted by production choices as much as songwriting elements.