Why Do We Do This Stuff?

We’re all in this crazy business because we love music. And most of us who have gravitated into the recording part of this crazy business have done so because we are similarly hooked on sound. We really and truly get off on the stuff. We like what it does to us. We wallow in the sensory luxury of the really spectacular sonic magic that comes out of loudspeakers.

Speaking for myself, I have always been fascinated by the “sound character” of all sorts of environments, machines, and other incidental noise sources, as well as music instruments. It seems to me that I mostly perceive things more in terms of their sound than their visual appearance or odor. I have occasionally even toyed with the idea of writing a detective novel where most of the descriptions would be auditory rather than visual, as in (in my first noire attempt): “After she slammed the door on her way out, I sank into what was left of stillness in my harshly echoing office, until beneath the rising surface of quiet I could once again hear the insistent rush of traffic below the windows, occasional horn stings and the rapid shrilling of a prowl car bulling its way through pedestrians, red lights and a gridlock as tangled as my mind. The reverberations of her anger slowly tailed off into urban night noise, Fiona Apple in my inner ear with a passing boomvan keeping time.” Oh well. Even though Spenser has nothing to fear from me, I hope you get the idea. Things and emotions can be perceived in terms of how they sound.

The point is, I hear my world as much as I see it, and usually I am acutely aware of how it sounds at a perceptual level that seems to me to be more conscious than what the average person experiences. There was a stretch, for instance, when I first really got into reverb, that I felt like I spent all my time hearing the spaces between notes and had the damndest time keeping the notes themselves in mind. Clients would be moaning about distortion on the guitar track and all I could hear was the really interesting spatial double decay of the snare hit from the combination of the overheads and the guitar mics! This is, of course, one of the curses of being a recording engineer.

I suspect that for many of our end-users, much of the emotional impact of sound is mostly pre-conscious and that they are not as aware of the effect that the sound of a given situation is having upon them. And that has some interesting implications for people in our line of work, which I’ll get to in a minute. Meanwhile, I also suspect that many of you are like me, or else you wouldn’t be reading this. All this sound stuff, these emotional meanings that sound has for us, are central elements in our recording craft. Mostly we take all this for granted.

The reason I’m telling you all this is to illuminate just how clear, powerful and effective our sense of hearing is. But what I really want to discuss is how that hearing system works, and how it is that it works so well that we aren’t even aware of it working. And once we know this stuff, we can really expand our craft as recording engineers. Avanti!