A sound option
The HinduAudio Engineers contribute a lot to making a piece of music worth listening
Been to a great live music performance? Thank the audio engineers who make all that possible.
It’s close to 11 in the night…… Dipanshu has just come out of finishing an AV-sync for a multi-starrer movie, and Seema is entering to give a final shape to the song she recorded in the evening. Wondering, if we are speaking about night riders or party hoppers? Not exactly.
Music affects us like no other art form. Great audio enhances our favourite entertainment — amplifying their impact with everything from multi- channel soundtracks for blockbuster films, to iconic video game sound effects. And having the right set of hands behind the controls is the key to ensuring that audio is recorded accurately, effectively, and with a resonance that makes it a piece of art. Yes, we are talking about Audio Engineers who contribute a lot to making a piece of music worth listening.
What is Audio Engineering all about? It’s a creative subject and deals with the art of quality sound manipulation that involves sound reinforcement, recording, mixing, integration and mastering. The foot-tapping music, large live concerts and the likes have an audio engineer behind the scenes recording albums, engineering live concerts, broadcasting sound and film content, churning out ringtones and so on.
This brings us to the core question of what is a pre-requisite to become an audio engineer. If you live and breathe music, back it up with a formal education in an audio engineering course from a reputed institute then you have the prefect ingredients to rock the world.
Insisting on the importance of for mal education, Aditya Ramamkrishnan, a graduate from SAE and an Audio faculty at AAT, says, “Formal education helped me in developing a critical thinking mind, which helped me again in taking chances, understanding respected industries and their work ethic. I find it essential for any aspiring student to take up formal education. It is the initial foundations that will strengthen their careers.”A trained audio engineer will have a thorough knowledge of working with musicians, music directors, dubbing artists and filmmakers. The key is the amount of practical time they get to handle technology when they are getting trained for the business. Of late, an ideal mix— breed of audio engineers-cum-musicians are evolving, thanks to the perfect integration of aesthetic and technology while imparting formal education.
Today, the world of entertainment seeks audio engineers in live sound, sound for film, film sound design, sound for games, special effects sound, acoustical engineers for sound, theatre specialists, content creators, broadcast sound engineers, on location sound engineers and so on.
Audio engineers, due to their complex job, need to be professionally and thoroughly trained. There is a lot of training involved for an audio engineer to know just what an engineer is actually required to do and how. An audio engineer has a big and crucial job — if there is a performance, which may be anything from a small indoor performance to a very large outdoor one, audio engineers are responsible for everything from correctly determining how to get the sound out with the same quality of receptiveness to the crowd attending the performance to how to get the sound into the PA system ( microphone setup, etc.) and also how to stop annoying technical problems.-thehindu.com