With the recent Academy Awards, chances are, you didn’t give much thought to a couple of the more obscure categories: sound editing and sound design.
The Best Actor awards and Best Picture usually get more pomp and circumstance, but without awesome audio, a movie would fall flat. This year, the exact same movies were up for both sound mixing and sound editing, so what exactly is the difference in sound editing vs sound mixing?
Crafting the sound story of a movie
When you’re sitting in a movie theater watching that new release, you might notice the complexity of the sound. The way it moves from left to right, gets louder and softer, seems almost 3D at times. You’ll hear the slam of a car door, the click-clack of heels on linoleum, the thwap of a fist hitting flesh in an exciting fight scene.
So what is edited and what is mixed?
Ken Theriot runs an audio recording site called Home Brew Audio, where he teaches people about the technicalities of audio recording and breaks things down into simple terms.
He said there’s an easy way to think about sound editing versus sound mixing, which is to compare it to photography.
“For sound editing, it would be equivalent to taking a picture, then changing it to make it look better with a filter, or rotating it, or cropping it,” he said. “With sound mixing, you take that photograph and put it into Photoshop. Then you add elements like text, a colored background, or more images.”
So, sound editing is the basic piece, and sound mixing is putting all those pieces together to make a final, seamless product.
Sound editing vs sound mixing: How does it work?
Why sound editing comes first
With movies, there’s a lot that needs to be done before the sound mixers get their hands on the audio.
Microphones dangle in front of actors capturing their lines. Foley artists (named after sounds effects artist Jack Foley), reproduce everyday sounds that are added to the film in post-production.
“When you watch a film and see a scene, very little of that is actually being recorded on set,” said Theriot. “Most of that stuff, the door slams, the sound of somebody taking off their clothes, the sound of people snapping open a soda, is all done with sound design. Those Foley artists fill up a library full of sounds. For example, the sound of a spaceship landing from one popular show was made by a Foley artist scraping a key over a piano wire.”
Many of those artists go out with a mobile recorder and capture sounds that are interspersed throughout a movie, to make it seem more real and in focus.
“So that is what the Oscars mean by sound editing, what they are talking about is the creation of sound effects,” said Theriot.
Without those sound effects, you wouldn’t be able to hear the texture of a scene or feel like you were standing right there with the actors and the drama.
When sound mixing takes center stage
After the dialogue is recorded and the sound effects are figured out, all those snippets of audio go to someone called a “sound mixer.”
“Let’s say the editor gave the mixer a sound effect for someone kicking someone else in the gut, and maybe it wasn’t loud enough. The mixer’s job is to change that, to make it sound realistic with what else is going on in the movie,” said Theriot. “They take all sounds created, developed and gathered by the editor…and like a conductor, they find a perfect way to blend them all together, so when you’re watching, you’re unconscious of the fact that anything has been done because it sound so natural.”
The mixer decides whether the sound should come in from the left or the right, how loud the dialogue is over the sound effects.
“Sound mixers don’t create — they blend sounds together to create a soundscape for a film,” said Theriot.
Shane Grush owns Grush Audio, which creates original music and sound design for advertising agencies, films, TV, and video games and admittedly loves the type of work sound mixers do.
“What I really love is the stuff you don’t notice,” he said. “If you get someone really good in our field they make you engage in the story, and all that tech stuff is just out of the way. You hear the dialogue, you connect with the characters, you see the commercial, you hear a piece of music and you connect with the message.”
Some say the sound editor is like the composer, but then the conductor, or sound mixer, is the one who decides the outcome of the song. More flutes here, a rise of drums there, a crescendo of violins.
The sound mix is the final product.
Taking stock of the difference
Where you watch a movie will largely dictate just how much of the sound editing and sound mixing you’ll be able to hear. Movie theaters have acoustic designs to accentuate all of those subtle sounds and their artful mix.
Next time you head to theater maybe you’ll take more stock in the sounds. Does the audio move from one side to the other? Do the voices stand-out compared to the background sounds? Can you hear small sounds that put you in the very time and place of that movie?
Sound is just another facet in the art of moviemaking — a small piece of a bigger picture that makes a film come to life.
So, for your next Academy Awards viewing party, you can impress all your friends with your sound knowledge.
