Weekly Reflection April 3-April 10

I was pleased with this past week’s progress to say the least! The mastering phase was completed and I was able to reference the final mix across a variety of audio mediums to assess its translation capabilities. To my excitement, everything sounded great! The mix was mastered to the commercial peak level of 0dB (naturally), with an RMS (perceived loudness level) of about -7. This retains much of the natural dynamics of the piece while still “pounding” loud enough for the modern masses. I also was able to make some additional edits to the video in Premiere, and my full piece now sits at 3 minutes and 50 seconds. This is the PERFECT length in my opinion. I had to go back into premiere to balance the audio snippets I placed in there before the actual instrumental plays to match the loudness level. This was a bit tricky as, to be honest, the mixing of audio in Premiere is not great, and I am not a huge fan of Adobe Audition either. I kept the pre-instrumental sounds slightly lower in volume (-.5dB) than the instrumental so that when the song kicks in it catches the listener’s ear. Overall, this week I accomplished exactly what I set out to do, and I am sitting in a good place because of it!

I stumbled upon a quite intriguing article on Medium this week about audio engineering for VR. It takes into account the notion of truly using all of the “3D space” provided when considering mixing, with the idea that the user wears a headset. Essentially, one must think about the full 360 degree space that sounds may sit at. This is a bit different than some audio engineers’ opinions of mixing. For example, some believe in mixing everything in mono as opposed to stereo. Others believe that sounds should only be panned either left, right or center (this is called LCR panning). Mixing for VR, however, requires deep thought into all the potential nooks and crannies that the sounds may fit into. What if a sound needs to seem like it’s coming from behind you? I tried to think about how I could incorporate some of these ideas into my own mixing and came up with some subtly manipulations of stereo imaging which pan the high end out wide and narrow the bass to a more mono position. It is almost impossible to actually tell the difference when one is not wearing a good pair of studio, over-ear monitors however.