Mixing the Life of an Audio Engineer

If you love sound, from music to the crunch of two cars colliding, and want to find a career for yourself where you weave sound into a tapestry of notes and effects then life as an audio engineer may be for you. As an audio engineer you can work in the record industry working with musicians and music producers to create fully realized albums of substance and passion. You will be surrounded by creative individuals with a love of music who want to see their work and the sounds in their minds come to life from a speaker. You will make the sound mixing board do things no one else has ever thought of as you take the various pieces of a song and tie it all together into a real work of art.

You can work in the film industry helping to mix the score and sound effects for feature films. If you sit in a theatre watching a movie and sometimes close your eyes to hear the sounds of the film envelop you and tell you their story, then you may consider the life of an audio engineer. You can build a massive portfolio of sound effects that you have created or recorded from the world around you - adding sounds that no one has ever heard and making your own mark on the film. You will work with directors to help them achieve the auditory component of their vision and when you pass by kids pretending to be in the latest summer blockbuster and mimicking the explosions and sounds from the film, you will know that it is your sounds they seek to emulate.

There is also the video game industry, working with other creative professionals to bring audio life to the digital worlds they have created. You will work with composers to set their music within the world of the game. You will bring your own catalog of sounds and record the world around you to bring bristling cityscapes and serene forests to life in ways that moving pictures cannot fully capture. While dozens of artists works for thousands of hours to create digital worlds in a computer, your sounds will bring a greater sense of life and action to those scenes. You will work with other creative people to see your collective vision of a fully realized world spring to life with the addition of voices or sounds that you provide. As an audio engineer, you will orchestrate the sounds of new, previously unimagined realities for audiences around the world.