Semantics

I keep seeing posts on internet message boards from production companies looking to fill positions for hire, and they list everything from 'Audio Directors' to 'Sound Designers' to 'Sound Specialists' to 'Audio Engineers'. Aside of the more obvious kind of confusion dealing with the actual responsibilities of each position, like expecting a "sound designer" to handle music composing as well, the words 'audio' and 'sound' keep being used as interchangeable terms, when they really are not.

Some dictionaries define 'audio' as 'sound within the acoustic range available to humans'. This is a flawed definition, given that natural hearing range varies from person to person. So, by this definition, what is 'audio' to a 10-year old may just be 'sound' to an 80-year old person. Most people can't hear the full spectrum of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, which was established a long while back as the range of human hearing – way before massive headache-inducing traffic jams, loud club music and noisy home renovations made it into our daily lives, which made most of us a bit deaf by lowering substantially the upper frequency threshold.

Someone once mentioned a very interesting and seemingly valid difference, which makes a lot of sense to me. Sound is the movement of air molecules compressing and expanding as waves that reach your ears. Audio is an electrical, digital and/or graphical representation of sound. Once sound energy reaches a microphone's diaphragm, it gets converted into audio in electrical form, which gets sent over to a converter and turned into audio in digital form, which in turn gets represented in graphical form on your computer screen. And later, it gets reconverted into electricity, and finally, back into sound coming out of speakers.

So, by that definition, I always picture a 'sound engineer' as someone with a great ear - more of an 'artist', who freely experiments with sound, like a painter does with colour and textures - whereas I think of an 'audio engineer' as someone who knows more about the details of the gear and tools and who has a vast knowledge of engineering, but not necessarily great artistic taste. So, sound would be more 'right-side of the brain' stuff, more intuitive and creative, and audio would be more 'left-side of the brain', more technical and driven by logic and facts. Which is not to say someone has to be professionally either on one or the other side, but a balance of each.

Who knows. That definition may be totally wrong, but I like it because it makes sense to me. Then again, putting cream cheese and raspberry jelly together doesn't make sense, but i like it too, so there you go.

The Toolbox

Instead of a rant, today I thought I would share some of my favourite free resources and tools for sound post. Most of them are for the Macintosh platform, but there may be some Windows versions.

So, in no particular order, here are five of them:

1. North Pole by Prosoniq
An RTAS pole filter plug-in with all parameters fully automatable. This one allows you to seriously mangle your sounds (if that's what you need). Right now, it only works on PPC Macs, but it will come out as an RTAS/AudioUnit version for Intel Macs in a few months.

2. Timecode Calculator by Netmedia
A small app for, well, making timecode calculations. It supports all common formats, including HD (23.796 fps) and film formats (feet and frames). Especially cool is the widget version.

3. LameBrain
Although this LAME-based MP3 encoder seems to be abandoned by its developer, it still works really well for batch encoding. It's reasonably small and fast, and it allows for Variable Bit Rate encoding.

4. ProTools Prefs & Database Helper by Jean-Charles Deshaies
If ProTools is acting up on you and just being a general PITA, you can use this to trash all the different pref and database files without having to go look for them in each folder. It also allows you to back up your prefs when everything is going great with PT, so you can restore them after you have deleted the corrupted ones.

5. Teleport by Abyssoft
An amazing app that lets you control several Macs with just one keyboard and mouse. Unlike KVM switchers, this lets you work as if you had several displays instead of computers: you just move the cursor across the screens.

So, there you go. Enjoy!

The client is sometimes right

I apologise for the long hiatus in posting. The whole holiday season/January getting-back-up-to-speed period has taken a heavy toll on my side projects. I will be posting on a weekly basis now, but from time to time, the smelly stuff will hit the fan and I may miss a post or two, so I also apologise in advance for that, too.

I've talked about clients before. How an abrasive and insensitive client can be the bane of our existence for a few hours, or even a few weeks. Well, now I would like to flip to the other side of the coin.

Picture this: you are someone who walks into a very complex recording or mixing session, and you have the most basic technical knowledge. Your job is to make sure everything runs smoothly, but you don't necessarily know how the guy or gal behind the board makes his 'magic' happen. You are trusting one person who has a very different skillset than yours with thousands of your company's dollars to deliver a quality product within a specific budget, on time. If you haven't worked with this person before, you would be absolutely right to feel a bit nervous. After all, if things goes wrong, who gets the blame? Sure, if the engineer screws up, you can take it up with the studio manager, but in the end, you are there to supervise the job – and that's your job. If the whole thing is a fiasco, you get in trouble.

I was recently in a similar position, of having to sit at the producer's desk and supervise a session – so I was the client, this time. The one difference is that I knew what the engineer was doing, and how to do it. On this particular session, I was very lucky to work with a fantastic engineer – a professional, knowledgeable and good-natured individual. But I can certainly see how the session would have been less than positive if the engineer had "marked their territory" and assumed a defensive stance. Granted, my attitude could have been one of seeking absolute control and imposing my own methods, but I felt it was good to simply trust the engineer to do the best work possible. If I had been a pain, I'm sure this particular person would have been just as professional, but at the huge expense of their emotional well-being.

It really is a very symbiotic relationship, the one between client and engineer, but I also compare it to having a guest in my house. Being the host, I'm expected to be gracious and welcoming. The guest is expected to be respectful of my home and my family. But if I'm an ass and then they are rude in return, I'm the only one to blame, mostly because we are in my home. Not that there is any justification for unprovoked rudeness, but that is the aggravating factor here: there is a natural level of even the slightest uneasiness in the client, not being in their own company/office environment (no matter how many sessions they have supervised). It is up to the engineer to make the first move and try to establish a positive vibe from the moment the client sets foot in the room. If the client doesn't want any of it, that's all you can do.

There are many people out there who are positive and good-willed. If you try and assume any new client is one of them before they step into your room, you have a much better chance of having a good session and a happy client at the end.