Intelligent Mixing Systems (IMS) are rapidly becoming integrated into music mixing and production workflows. The intelligences of a human mixer and IMS can be distinguished by their abilities to comprehend, assess, and appreciate context. Humans will factor context into decisions, particularly concerning the use and application of technologies. The utility of an IMS depends on both its affordances and the situation in which it is to be used. The appropriate use for conventional purposes, or its utility for misappropriation, is determined by the context. This study considers how context impacts mixing decisions and the use of technology, focusing on how the mixer's understanding of context can inform the use of IMS, and how the use of IMS can aid in informing a mixer of different contexts.

Professional artistic contexts, such as studio-based music production, are rarely investigated in naturalistic decision-making (NDM) research, though creative work is characterised by uncertainty, risk, a lack of clearly definable goals, and in the case of music production, a complex socio-technical working environment that brings together a diverse group of specialized collaborators. This study investigates NDM in the music production studio. In music production, there is a professional role explicitly tasked with taking decisions-the (record) producer. The producer, as a creative collaborator, is differentiated as a problem-solver, solution creator and goal setter. This investigation looks at the producer's metacognitive abilities for reflecting on the nature of problems and decisions. An important challenge for this study is to develop methods for observing decision-making without unrealistically reducing the amount of uncertainty around outcomes or creative intention within a studio production. In the face of that, a method is proposed that combines socio-cultural musicology and cognitive approaches and uses ethnographic data. Preliminary findings shed light on how the producer in this study self-manages his decisions and his interactions with, and in response to, the production environment; how decisions and actions sustain collaboration; how experience is utilized to identify scenarios and choose actions; and the kinds of strategies employed and their expected outcomes. Findings provide evidence that exercising producing skills and performing production tasks involve metacognitive reflection.

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Styles in creative works cannot adequately be represented by categories based on formal features. Instead, styles could be studied in terms of modal relationships between the features to provide a basis for definitions of structure in generative models. Modal relationships are more flexible and robust under the dynamic conditions of the artist's creative process. This article illustrates through the examples of Seljuk and Celtic patterns how these modal relationships emerge, why they are essential to detailed descriptions of style, and how they might be identified. Style as Process and Stylistic Features as Modal RelationshipsArtistic style is often described in terms of the formal features of the finished products. Terry Knight, Professor of Design Computing, presents a review of the historical notions of style in architecture theory that follow this line (Knight, 1994, pp. 3-23). But more importantly, Knight draws attention to the few approaches that consider style more as a process than a finished product.1 The 19th-century architect Gottfried Semper, for example, defines style through a formula "U ϭ C (x, y, z, t, v, w ...), where U is one of a number of possible styles of an object; x, y, z, t, v, w... are variable influences on style including purpose, materials, and techniques, local factors such as geography, climate, and culture, and personal choices of the artist; and U is a mathematical function C of x, y, z, t, v, w..." (Knight, 1994, p. 7). Likewise, this article treats style as dynamic in evolution and origin. A deeper understanding of factors contributing to the creative process leads to more accurate explanations of style and stylistic development. In turn, this understanding can be utilized to generate, or alter, further instances of a given style.Definitions of stylistic structure in artistic artifacts derived from observations of the finished artifacts and their formal features are disconnected from the generative processes that produced those artifacts. Formal features, as described by the traditional arts literature, refer to surface characteristics and a single state of an artifact. Mülayım's (1981) analytic work on Seljuk patterns, which categorizes them according to their polygonal geometries, shows this approach. But, style can be described in terms of structural relationships, which the artist generates and/or are effected during the process of creating an artifact. Even if two Seljuk patterns display different polygonal geometries, they might be built on the same structural relations. These relationships arise from the properties of the material in use and the social, political, physical, and psychological environment of the artist. This article focuses on identifying and describing a subset of these dynamic, structural relationships.In "Playing Twenty Questions with Nature," cognitive scientists Whitman Richards and Aaron Bobick claimed a "Principle of Natural Modes" to set the ground for any perceptual categorizing of the structure and events in the world. The principle they introduc...