Remembering Intention

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately regarding music and musicality when it comes to mixing. I love talking about that kind of stuff with people, and it’s a big part of a lot of the training I do.

Here’s a video that popped up in my YouTube feed the other day all about music. Some of the stuff in this video isn’t necessary for engineers to understand, but I think it’s worth a view. Personally I enjoyed this a bunch because it reminds of a class I took on this in college, but what I like about this for engineers is how Jacob is explaining there’s intention behind the music.

Music is created to do something and communicate something and evoke something within the listener. Often as audio engineers, we get caught up in creating certain sounds and miss the context we’re molding those sounds within. If we’re not careful, we can easily get lost in our world and forget we’re supposed to be supporting a world that already exists.

So I hope this video may serve as a reminder to us that there’s often a lot beneath the music that we need to support when we’re mixing. Plus, you might even learn something in the process.