Enhance Your Hearing With Darkness

Conventional mixing wisdom has always had it that a little bit of quiet before you mix can help you better zero in on the details of a mix. In fact, that's one of the tips in personal prepping for your mix as outlined in The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and Audio Mixing Bootcamp books.

"Try to stay in the most quiet area that you can for as long as you can before you begin your mix. Concentrate on the sounds that you’re hearing and try to identify what they are and the direction they’re coming from. Studies have found that this can make your hearing much more acute."

The books go on to provide another useful tip that many mixers employ while mixing that many dub The Ray Charles Effect:

"Also remember that closing your eyes while mixing can sometimes improve your hearing by both lessening the distractions and allowing your brain to concentrate additional processing power on that sense."

While this was mostly empirical knowledge, a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University have found that a temporary loss of vision does indeed improve your hearing. The findings were published in the peer review publication Neuron and found that the brains of adult mice could be rewired to compensate for vision loss by improving their hearing. 

Of course, anyone who has spent at a little time around Stevie Wonder knows how acute his sense of hearing is, as is that of all blind people. We didn't need a study to confirm that.

But what it does confirm is that by just sitting in a quiet dark room before you mix, or closing your eyes during a mix, can often allow you to zero in a things in a mix that you missed before. And lowering the lights in the mixing area has always been done for a good reason, whether we realized or not. Give it a try. Go to laboratoryequipment.com read a synopsis of the article.

You can also read additional excerpts from both The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and Audio Mixing Bootcamp on the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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How To Calibrate Your Hearing

One of the mistakes that many audio mixers make is not calibrating their hearing before beginning a mix. It's not that you can't get a great mix without it, it's just that doing so makes things easier, since it takes you less time to focus on the details of a mix. Here's an excerpt from the latest 3rd edition of The Mixing Engineer's Handbook that describes how to calibrate your hearing before the mix begins.

"Our ears are amazing organs that are capable of hearing sounds so faint that they move the eardrum less than the diameter of a hydrogen molecule. It’s important that we first calibrate them in order to take advantage of their enormous capabilities. Here’s how:

• Try to stay in the most quiet area that you can for as long as you can before you begin your mix. Concentrate on the sounds that you’re hearing and try to identify what they are and the direction they’re coming from. Studies have found that this can make your hearing much more acute.

• Stay away from a large meal before you mix since it can temporarily make your hearing less sharp. 

• In order to improve your ability to hear faint sounds, relax your jaw or just smile. There are tiny muscles in your jaw that can actually disrupt the action of your ear drums and eustachian tube, which control the inner ear pressure.

• If you will be doing work that requires your attention on a computer monitor screen, even small noises can subtly blur your vision. Turn the level down and try to keep the uninvited noises at bay.

TIP: Also remember that closing your eyes while mixing can sometimes improve your hearing by both lessening the distractions and allowing your brain to concentrate additional processing power on that sense."

To read additional excerpts from The Mixing Engineer's Handbook 3rd edition and other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.