Towards an Automated Multitrack Mixing Tool using Answer Set Programming

The use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) inside musical domains has been demonstrated specially in composition, but so far it hasn’t overtaken engineering areas in studio-music (post) production such as multitrack mixing for stereo imaging. This article aims to demonstrate the use of this declarative approach to achieve a well-balanced mix. A knowledge base is compiled with rules and constraints extracted from the literature about what professional music producers and audio engineers suggest creating a good mix. More specially, this work can deliver either a mixed audio file (mixdown) as well as a mixing plan in (human-readable) text format, to serve as a starting point for producers and audio engineers to apply this methodology into their productions. Finally this article presents a decibel (dB) and a panning scale to explain how the mixes are generated.