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 ...