Multitouch Interface for Audio Mixing

Audio mixing is the adjustment of relative volumes, panning and other parameters corresponding to different soundsources, in order to create a technically and aestheticallyadequate sound sum. To do this, audio engineers employ"panpots" and faders, the standard controls in audio mixers. The design of such devices has remained practically unchanged for decades since their introduction. At the time,no usability studies seem to have been conducted on suchdevices, so one could question if they are really optimizedfor the task they are meant for.This paper proposes a new set of controls that might beused to simplify and/or improve the performance of audiomixing tasks, taking into account the spatial characteristicsof modern mixing technologies such as surround and 3Daudio and making use of multitouch interface technologies.A preliminary usability test has shown promising results.