Skip to content Menu Our Bloggers Twitter Google News Substack FaceBook Contribute Contact Search Lead vocal tracks in popular music go quiet April 26, 2023 American Institute of Physics A general rule of music production involves mixing various soundtracks so the lead singerâ s voice is in the foreground . But it is unclear how such track mixing â and closely related lyric intelligibility â has changed over the . years Scientists from the University of Oldenburg in Germany carried out an analysis of hundreds of popular song recordings from 1946 to 2020 to determine the lead vocal to accompaniment ratio , or LAR . Their results appear in JASA Express Letters published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing , and show that , contrary to expectations , the