On Audio Engineering

Get your four piece guitar band in a room, deliver a killer performance, capture it with expensive microphones and set the levels on your mixing desks and what comes out of the speakers will sound… terrible. Turns out that we need bearded men called either Butch or Andrew spending days in a room full of mysterious and expensive boxes to get things to sound like what you hear on the radio.

What are these men doing, and why? Perhaps their job is bridging the gap between reality and perception. When you’re in a room watching someone perform and having a great time, your brain is doing a lot of work to make it sound as great to you as it does. On the radio, the brain doesn’t have as much to go on - and so the engineer has to fill this gap.

This leads us down a path discussing the predictive processing performed by the brain. The brain is constantly running a model of the world around us, and most of the time our senses are merely providing confirmation that this model is correct - it’s only when exposed to something unexpected that we actually wake up and focus. The brain is less stressed when its model is correct, so if music is conforming to our internal models we feel better. Melody, harmony and rhythm all boil down to patterns, and some patterns are more in line with the patterns that our brain deals with a lot and so feel more satisfying. It’s the musician’s job, or the audio engineer’s job, to bring out those patterns, and express them as well as they can possibly be expressed. Or something like that.

We spend quite a lot of time talking about Steven Wilson, apologies in advance. Shout out also to our co-host’s band, Trees on Venus. The EP rinsed at length on the episode is here (plug).