Music and Sound Engineering
Oisín Lough
“FreeFreq: A study of the impact of visual stimuli on the perception of audio.”
FreeFreq is an equaliser plug-in whose features are intentionally limited. With most equaliser plug-ins, the user is bombarded with a plethora of visual stimuli. I believed that these visual stimuli had an impact on a user’s perception of audio, and therefore influenced their decision-making process. I created FreeFreq with a lack of visual stimuli in order to focus the efforts of the user into using their ears solely. I wanted to understand how a visual representation of an audio sign would impact the ear of even the most well-trained sound engineers. My project consider of the construction of the plug-in, and base level research with some of my classmates gather information on whether or not the omission of visual stimuli really did have any impact on the perception of audio and the decision-making process. Each participant was tasked with processing the exact same audio signal with two different plugins, FreeFreq and FabFilter ProQ3, the latter of which has a visual representation of the audio signal.