The impact of audio effects processing on the perception of hardness of Bass Drum

In the music mixing, mixers and music producers often use hardness to describe the feeling of percussion instruments, such as the drum instruments. When dealing with the hardness of drums, the mixer often mixes the sound in terms of frequency and dynamics. One important issue is that it is difficult to define the contribution of adjusting the frequency or dynamics of the drum to the perception of drum tone hardness, and this perception is difficult to be quantified. A subjective user study on the hardness of drum sound is proposed. Taking the audio of the Bass Drum as an example, different audio effects are applied to process the Bass Drum. Twenty‐three participants were recruited to participate the auditory perception test. The result indicates that compression, equalisation, high‐frequency excitation and low‐frequency excitation all have varying degrees of impact on the hardness of the Bass Drum. The high‐frequency excitation and low‐frequency excitation have a statistically significant substantial influence on the sound hardness of the Bass Drum. Taking together, for the first time, the authors’ study comprehensively investigate the impact of audio effect processing on the perception of the hardness of Bass Drum, providing useful guidance for the application of various audio effects on percussion instruments.