I look forward to putting together the June issue of Mix each year, with its emphasis on studio design and lots of pages devoted to the year’s top new studios. And normally in this note I would be talking about my love of architecture and my fascination with physics, or about how much I get a kick out of walking into a new facility for the first time, observing how the look and feel of studios changes over the years.
But not this month. As I sit at my laptop late on a Wednesday night in mid-May, the rest of the issue in the can and ready to send to the printer, and my clothes packed for tomorrow’s flight to Nashville, my brain keeps spinning with thoughts about how we learn. About how we, as human beings, learn, and about how we in the pro audio community learn. More particularly, how we learn about immersive audio. Over the past month, in putting together the final panels and programming for the third annual Mix Nashville: Immersive Music Production event, all those thoughts have been amplified way past 10. Let me explain.
In two days, I’ll be welcoming 250-plus attendees to the event and then sitting down at the front of the room to moderate the opening Keynote Conversation. Three weeks ago, I didn’t have one keynote speaker, let alone two so we could have a conversation. I was starting to get nervous. I started pacing. I’m a pacer.
Then it hit me: Why don’t we turn the idea of a keynote on its head? Instead of featuring veteran, talented, credit-rich producers and engineers, why don’t we ask the next generation to talk about their experience and experimentation with immersive music production? It would be different, for sure. There’s a reason that our heroes deliver the opening remarks. Music is an aspirational career, filled with passion, where young talent dreams of someday becoming major talent. But immersive music is different, I told myself, for a number of reasons.
This will work. This is the right thing to do. So I started making calls, and soon I had three young, talented Nashville engineers—Trent Woodman, Hayden Tumlin and Maddie Harmon—each on the verge of taking the next step in their career, signed up and thrilled to be asked to speak to an industry audience. I came up with a new title and sent it to marketing. It would now be titled, “Emerging Engineers…And What They Can Teach Us About Immersive Music Production.” All systems go.
And then I hit Pause. This is supposed to be a panel about how we learn, about sharing knowledge between generations. I’m a journalist. I’ve never worked in a studio or served as a runner. I need help! I need a veteran, a legend, a hero. An award-winning producer and engineer who has a history of training assistants. It wouldn’t hurt if they were also a studio owner, product designer, inventor and longtime educator. So I called George Massenburg, and before I could finish my rambling pitch, he was in.
I can list countless reasons for why I think that we as an industry need to spend more time listening to, and learning from, up-and-coming engineers, but they all boil down to two fundamental beliefs when talking about immersive music.
From the Editor: A Voyage to the Vinyl Frontier
First, it’s not stereo. It’s not quad, 5.1 or 7.1, all of which exist in a two-dimensional field. Immersive has pitch, roll and yaw! There are no channels, in the traditional sense; there are objects and beds, a method of controlling digital data that comes directly from the videogame industry. And there is no 70-year history of immersive music, no generations yet to pass on the knowledge and experience. In one sense, up-and-coming or award-winning, we’re all in this together.
And second, anybody under the age of 35 can be considered a “digital native.” They’ve never seen a phone with a wire, and most have never put a CD into a tray. They downloaded from Napster before they were teens, and today they buy vinyl as a choice, not because it’s the only option. By the time they entered college, nearly any song they wanted to hear was available at their fingertips. And much to the consternation of audio old-timers, unless they work in the music industry or have a fondness for quality sound, most have never sat down and listened to music in front of two speakers. Most young engineers would love to mix in a nice, tuned 7.1.4 room, but few can afford it. Necessity being the mother of invention, they’re more comfortable working in headphones, in binaural, maybe renting a proper studio later to check their mixes.
None of that should be considered a detriment. It’s simply the way the world works. And we don’t have to look too far back to see the parallels in the mono-to-stereo conversion. It took a long time and a lot of experimentation before there was mainstream acceptance. And then along came a handful of young, hungry rock and roll engineers in the early to mid-1960s—from London, New York and L.A.—who didn’t really think about the rules, and they ended up blowing the lid off the joint and changing the sound of recorded music forever. Like I said, it’s time to talk to the next generation.
—Tom Kenny, Co-Editor
