My work as an audio engineer has stemmed from my 20-year career as a DJ/Sound Engineer in bars and clubs around the UK and abroad. Since 1998 I have completed 2 college courses in audio production and a 4-year university degree in Popular Music Production, which included radio production, live sound recording and sound design. During this period, I worked as a sound engineer for live acts and as an on-location sound engineer for a TV station in Spain. After my graduation, I worked for UTV Media as a commercial producer for 7 years and won awards both locally and nationally for my production work. In February 2016, I went freelance with my production work and have not looked back.
For my dissertation at University I covered the subject of ‘How sound creates visualisations within a listener’s mind’. The subject fascinated me as at the time I was studying Buddhism and practising visualisation techniques for meditation. I wanted to incorporate this practice with audio and so came up with the idea of the dissertation. I re-created part of a radio drama play called ‘The Revenge’ by the late great Andrew Sachs, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for my studies. The play is produced using sound effects only with no dialogue and is recorded using Bin-aural techniques.
My study found that, after playing the same soundscape to several listener’s, the experience was subjective and provoked different visualisations and emotions for each listener. When I delved deeper into the listener experience I found that certain sounds provoked a mixture of memory and imagination, which helped to build their visual and emotional experience. Since then I ask myself the question “Is imagination a manipulation of existing memories that we have forgotten mixed with more prominent memories?”…
(Part 2 coming soon, stay tuned)
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