AUDIO
IF A SOUND ENGINEER FALLS IN THE FOREST … WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A SOUND ENGINEER ? | Jeff Hawley
If you asked me 20 years ago what I do for a living , I would ’ ve likely answered some variant of “ I ’ m a bassist ” or “ I play bass guitar ,” etc . At some point not long after that period I may have answered , “ I record and produce music .” As I veered into live sound more and more , the answer may have been something like , “ I ’ m a sound engineer ” or “ I ’ m a live audio engineer .” It dawned on me recently ( perhaps due to the fact that I am back in school pursuing an advanced philosophy degree and I think about strange stuff like this more often ) that the success of these terms in describing what each of these roles actually entails is not equally distributed . A bass player plays bass . Simple . A recording engineer / producer creates and / or records music for some sort of on-demand distribution . Pretty straightforward . What about ‘ sound engineer ’? The ‘ engineer ’ part of the live sound engineer role is nebulous at best . What the heck are we engineering ? The sound itself ? The complete sound system ? Hmmm …
As readers of my column know , I like to dig into word origins and etymologies . Checking into the word ‘ engineer ’ points to our first interesting aspect — it is both a noun and a verb . An engineer ( noun ) engineers ( verb ). The personification came first , popping up in 12th century references to constructors of military engines . The more general ( non-military ) sense came a bit later in the early 15th century . It seems to jive roughly with one possible sense of what we do each week behind the console as live sound engineers , namely invent and design the combined mix of the various sounds in the acoustic space .
This particular usage ( arranging , guiding , or constructing ) as a verb first came into vogue in the 1800 ’ s , but it does seem to describe fairly closely what we are still all up to now . I think there is an important idea in this broader definition of ‘ an engineer who engineers audio ’ — it isn ’ t just a matter of which fader we move , or which reverb we select for channel 17 , it is a much more comprehensive and cohesive look at every audio element in the given audio space . The guitar amp position and volume , the baffles at the rear of the sanctuary , the in-ear monitors the musicians are wearing , etc . all are in scope as to what would be counted as part of the audio we are arranging and guiding and constructing in real-time as variables change from moment to moment . Pretty cool stuff .
The first part of the phrase ‘ sound engineer ’ is surprisingly a much trickier conceptual animal altogether . What is sound ? What is it that we are arranging and guiding and constructing ? Jump back again to the Jeff of 20 years ago and I bet I ’ d say , “ Well , sound is a longitudinal compression wave of some type , a vibration that propagates through a transmission medium such as a gas , liquid or solid .” I sounded pretty fancy back then , huh ? Well , one of the things that the passing years brings is a steadily increasing collection and awareness of the ‘ things I now know I don ’ t really know ’. Sure , sound can be described as a wave . I think most of us engineers and many musicians would give some sort of similar account . But here is where the philosophy schooling has since kicked in and opened up a few ideas about this wave account that I hope can also get your wheels spinning .
From a philosophical standpoint , the description of sound as a wave is only one of a handful of