Episode notes
A bird and a jackhammer, playing at the same moment. Then the same two sounds again, with nothing changed but two faders. Not one sample of either recording moved, and the whole scene turned around. That is mixing: you are not changing the sounds, you are changing their relationship, and that relationship is the mix.
This is the audio lecture for the fifth module, where a soundwalk recorded and edited over the past two modules becomes a finished piece. The episode's argument is that a mix decides where the listener stands: what is close, what is far, what they turn toward, and what they only half notice.
Level is taught through Pauline Oliveros's focal and global attention, as one person's act of listening handed to someone else. Panning is demonstrated, a slow drift against a nervous flicker, and then turned into the question every soundwalk mix has to answer: do you put a sound where it was, or where you want it? Automation comes in as a performance you can edit, from the days when a mix took several pairs of hands on a console, to Daphne Oram drawing sound onto film.
Then one question for the artists: where is the mixer? In the room, for Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. In the artist's own narrating voice, for Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk. In the listener's own ears, for Maryanne Amacher and Jacob Kirkegaard. And still in the studio that grew out of Pierre Schaeffer's work, with Kassel Jaeger. It ends on who gets to hold the fader, from Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet to spatial audio in your earbuds to software that will happily balance a mix for you, and why a point of view is a little unbalanced on purpose.
Headphones recommended.
Pairs with the Module 5 pages and the mixing and automation screencasts.
Sound credits
"Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Excerpted, mixed, panned and automated for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/
"jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Excerpted and mixed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/
Chapters
00:00 Two sounds, two faders
02:58 Level, and the mixer you already own
06:13 Space, and where things actually were
09:25 Automation: a performance you can edit
13:55 Where is the mixer?
18:16 Who holds the fader