The Future of Audio Engineering....

[tateeskew]

i believe that analog will again regain top status in the recording world by way of digital. not just in sound recording, but information in general. organic computing via nanoscience will come to fruition through shortcomings of digital information gathering and speed. i debated this with a few people, including stever, over at electrical. it makes for good conversation, indeed. here is an excerpt from a post i made during our conversation:

"...i'm not going to jump into the analog vs. digital aural debate. i think it's fairly obvious, at least to people who study the science of sound, that resonant electromechanical force is real and there are frequencies outside of the spectrum of documented human hearing that affect the way we perceive to hear things. the binaural beats created from said frequencies may have a lot to do with this perception and the feelings we experience as well. digital has a long way to go in capturing these "feeling" frequency ranges, but it is most definitely attainable.

there's a whole bunch more that we could go into here, but it would bore most i'm sure. recording sound pressure levels at the molecular level via organic "microphones" using nanoscience would be a good topic. for instance, record a musician in a room. playback of the recording results in your ability to move closer to the musician to hear the subtleties of his/her playing, move to the side and hear what it sounded like to the side of them in the room when the recording took place. in essence, capturing a true performance. how about recording a room full of people, have someone across the room whisper something that you cannot hear during recording. now, playback the audio and walk to where the person was in the room and be able to hear the whisper reproduced with the other chatter becoming ambient.

people can argue all they want, it's this type of forward moving science i want to see come to fruition in the documentation of music, sound and information in general. just think, media isn't a problem when organic computers and non-laboratory controlled quantum logic gates are realities because the "computer" will create memory when needed. "

i think the process of finding said information will be the chore at hand. much like our brains, the organic computer will file away everything it comes in contact with, even processes by which to solve massive problems, but puting the pieces together and recalling the information will be the roadblock.

[Mark Alan Miller]

... I see a future where people no longer have to research their own papers and hypothesis test their own thoughts, and just copy threads from online bulletin boards, and call it academic work. It doesn't mean libraries will disappear.

Sorry for being such a snot. I'm just jealous that I couldn't do internet research when I was in school.

I have a friend who recently taught a course at a local community college, and flunked several students because their final papers were cut-and-paste jobs from stuff found online. Took him almost no time to Google a phrase here and a phrase there to find the sources..! Makes me wonder how these kids thought they wouldn't get caught... or are they really that dumb? (Not meant to be a slam of community colleges, by the way...)

Sorry, kinda off topic.

[markee2004]

Within our lifetimes there's still going to be people that prefer to use analogue equipment. I am of the opinion that this is not a question that can be judged by history, i.e people using newer technology because it is deemed better, or more effective than previous technology. Because history has never experienced such quick technological growth before. analogue technology, and digital technology can both improve vastly in the coming years, yet we do not know if the money will be put into analogue technolology in order that it can, seeming as it is already deemed essentialy dead by many of the factions that have an influence on the way that music is recorded now.

In a nutshell, until it is proven that digital technology is as good as, or better than analogue technology there will still be people that prefer to use analogue technology, not neccesarilly so much in the mainstream but when serious artists want to produce a serious document because it is better. Also I think it depends allot on what the listening format is at any given time, i.e will c.d/mp3 be overtaken by a higher resolution format, or do the consumers find this adeqaute enough considering the portabability/ease of use benefits of said formats. (not to mention reperoduction technolgy, i.e speakers/monitors changing, and standards becoming higher, also microphone technology, and recording techniques channging to more realistically capture the way the human ear filters sound/the way we percieve sound. In short I think this is an unanswerable question, because how are we supposed to know what technology will be invested in).

[Brian]

I thought this was the future of audio engineering not medium discussion.
Will there be a demand for audio engineers in the future?
Yes, of course there will. Good ones like Joel! I like Joel's comment about regionalization rather than nationalization becoming the "norm".
I'm in Memphis and that is what's happened here. I'm in the middle of recording an 18 band compilation CD and all the bands would previously been of national caliber, not saying I'm not moving this thing to some friend's desks, but they have followings and are very talented, with all the drawbacks of making a comp cd with so many groups.
I've heard some of their earlier recordings and some are good, but, most are frightening how bad the engineering their "friend" did, or, the drumer has a protools rig, yada yada yada.
I work with someone who mixed a project or more and got some aclaim (not enough to use) but you couldn't get a great track out every time. Why? Because he doesn't really know what he's doing. The word textbook has no relationship to his talent. No basics= no reliability. Usually he can get the job done, but, sometimes......
So, an engineer with "ears", trained in the classic techniques, interned, assisted, engineered, learned from other's mistakes, managed a facility and all the while keeping one's "chops" up, yeah, as long as music is played through instruments well (key point) there will be a need for engineers in any medium.
How many players can play well might determine how many are needed in the future because any kid in his bedroom with a computer can do pitch changing and beat perfection. That doesn't mean they have "ears", the reason engineers used to get hired. Well, that and politics.

[Brian]

I thought this was the future of audio engineering not medium discussion.
Will there be a demand for audio engineers in the future?
Yes, of course there will. Good ones like Joel! I like Joel's comment about regionalization rather than nationalization becoming the "norm".
I'm in Memphis and that is what's happened here. I'm in the middle of recording an 18 band compilation CD and all the bands would previously been of national caliber, not saying I'm not moving this thing to some friend's desks, but they have followings and are very talented, with all the drawbacks of making a comp cd with so many groups.
I've heard some of their earlier recordings and some are good, but, most are frightening how bad the engineering their "friend" did, or, the drumer has a protools rig, yada yada yada.
I work with someone who mixed a project or more and got some aclaim (not enough to use) but you couldn't get a great track out every time. Why? Because he doesn't really know what he's doing. The word textbook has no relationship to his talent. No basics= no reliability. Usually he can get the job done, but, sometimes......
So, an engineer with "ears", trained in the classic techniques, interned, assisted, engineered, learned from other's mistakes, managed a facility and all the while keeping one's "chops" up, yeah, as long as music is played through instruments well (key point) there will be a need for engineers in any medium.
How many players can play well might determine how many are needed in the future because any kid in his bedroom with a computer can do pitch changing and beat perfection. That doesn't mean they have "ears", the reason engineers used to get hired. Well, that and politics.

[markee2004]

Firstly "I thought this was the future of audio engineering not medium discussion." What the hell is this supposed to mean.

And secondly you should know by now assuming that you are an adult that anyone can "prove" anything by using examples of their own experience, and that all that usually shows is a lack of imagination.

[Brian]

It means we went of course as usual and started discussing something else.
Well, I'm not an adult I'm only three and A HALF years old. I forgot I was supposed to just make stuff up, sorry.

[tonejunkee]

Pro Tools will be the death and rebirth of music. I'm hooked on it, but you can really fuck things up. there has to be some restraint - that Son Volt album "okemah and the melody of riot" is a modern masterpiece
it was completely done in analog - is anyone even reading this?


http://www.myspace.com/benlong

[Brian]

I'm not.

[floid]

someone mentioned, a few pages back, the analogy of technological development to natural selection, and that has indeed been true for a majority of the time humans have been on earth - flint knapping techniques, types of projectile weapons, animal husbandry, garment manufacture, etc,etc, gradually evolving over several generations as new minds formed new hypotheses about the tool or method in relation to its function. Maybe someone started thinking a thinner arrowhead might have greater penetrating power, until realizing you can only knap flint so thin before it becomes too brittle...you get the idea.
But such processes take time: realizing the main reason you can't farm in the desert is a lack of water doesn't mean you sit down that night to design and construct an industrial strength sprinkler system.
Or at least, not until recently. Technology (and as a result, human population, extinction of other species, natural resource depletion, etc) has exploded over the last five hundred years, and particularly in the last 0ne hundred or so years. As a result, there hasn't been time for the natural selection process to occur: it's one thing to realize that the human nervous system does not come innately equipped with the perceptual mechanisms needed for flight and start putting tons of guages in an airplane cockpit, and quite another to figure out that a pilot might be more likely to misuse some of those instruments made possible by the latest technology (think about a digital altimeter: the display for 999 ft looks way more similar to 1999 ft than 1000ft).
The technology created by, created for, or beneficial to the sound engineer is currently undergoing this same evolutional latency: i've been dicking around with this stuff for less than ten years, and even in that brief span of time it's amazing to think of the changes that have occurred. And while some professional engineers out there may have had the opportunity to extensively interact with all of this technology and determine not only the relative merits but also the inherent characteristics of each, many of us haven't. I (to speak from personal experience, since that is the only reliable source of information i have) jumped straight from a pioneer cassette deck with two $10 mics, to the wave of studio-in-a-box products that came out around the turn of the millennium (i want to call this approximately the third wave of these, when hard-drive supplanted zip supplanted minidisc and bit/sample rate started to move beyond CD quality). My point is that i took others' word that the box i bought was superior to earlier models in terms of sound quality, rather than take the time to decide for myself what i thought of each system's inherent fidelity (which currently has no absolute reference point - until we reach those days when a DSP is developed which can render the behavior of sound in a room at the molecular level, we can only speak of the differences we perceive between the ways in which various technologies REPRODUCE sound, rather than differences from the ORIGINAL sound). And even for those who have had such opportunities, there remains the uncertainty of any given technology's longterm viability.
who knew cognitive psychology had anything to do with being another one of those musician types
---
Now on to the charge that music is inherently expendable. Perhaps that's simply because, until Edison came along, there was no way to preserve it? Not that that's actually true, of course: If i'm remembering the history of music correctly, we have records of Lydian music first performed thousands (plural) of years ago (which we have thanks to stone tablets, natch). Of course, this also doesn't give us an accurate idea of what that music actually sounded like when it was first performed - the fidelity of our current reproductions is limited to our ability to decode those stone tablets.
Us musicians are sometimes a lazy lot, though - imagine if every time we wrote a new jam, we had to pull out the chisel and marble to preserve it. We'd probably just say farg this, play it for our friends one drunken saturday night, and hey, the universal question just got erased by the next morning's hangover...Except for the one guy who didn't drink, and can't play the way you do, remembered enough to do his own rendition of it for his prego wife, and his child had it imprinted on their brain while still in the womb, which results in yet another corruption when they unwittingly write it again in their thirties... I'd imagine there are quite a few folks on this board who are in some way affiliated with rock, which owes a huge debt to the blues - the blues as they have been in the last hundred and fifty years or so. And some of us are trying desperately to get out from under this enormous shadow, yet how can you rock without the blues if the blues is rock? What if we had the opportunity to go back and listen to the blues the way it was 500 years ago? what new inspirations might we find?
Music IS a lifestyle (device, support, reflection, expression, whatever else) and is necessarily tied to the culture in which it was produced. Does that mean the music of cultures in other times and places is irrelevant? Only to the extent that we favor cultural isolation. But if we take that to its logical extreme, then only those born without ears are qualified to be musicians. Personally, I don't want to reinvent music, i just want to help it along its merry evolutionary way.