Does this sound good?
/I’ve been working on audio for a bunch of years now. That means making hundreds of decisions everyday about audio perception. Does this sound too big? Too dark? Too harsh? Too muffled?
You make those decisions based on your sonic experience of the world on the one hand and on your experience of other media on the other hand. So you decide what sounds good based on other people decisions in the past. You stand on the shoulders of giants. How many people do sound design for a living? Ben Burtt must be quite sore.
Audio, good audio at least, is always somewhere between true reality and that distorted perception of reality which comes from years of listening to media. Guns really don’t sound like they do in the movies and probably dinosours didn’t either. We are all subjected to this sonic zeitgeist that we can’t escape. You need to distance yourself from reality and use trickery so the audience feels that what they hear is authentic. Such is the irony of the sound design job.
But I can cope with that. Art is really about encouraging that delusion, isn’t it? About being larger than life, about dreaming, fantasy and imagination. That’s fine. The problem doesn’t really come with being real or authentic, we crossed that bridge when we started doing cave paintings. The issue comes with the simple challenge of evaluatiing quality.
For the most part, of course you know when things sound good. You even know how to improve them if you have the time. So you make choices, tweak things and listen again. But on the back of your brain there is this weird feeling, that tells you, but how do I really know? This is a common illness among creative professionals.
Objective things that you can measure are much more easy on the human neocortex. Maths and physics (maybe not quantum physics) are comfortably predictable. On the same vein, the logic behind programming offers the same warmth. Even though you don’t understand why something doesn’t work, there is a logical explanation and you just need to find it.
But quality appreciation on a creative field is a different beast. Is still processed in the brain, but much more based on instinct, computed using a mix of new and ancient parts of it. This is something that my analytical part dislikes because is a process that I can’t contain and use at my leasure that easily. It is not a lightbulb, clean and convenient, but a fire with uneven heat and light.
So there is not much else to do but to let go and follow your instincts. Sometimes it won’t feel right, sometimes you won’t be able to even tell but that’s the gig.
Is always good to sanity check with the people around you but beware. The perfect recipie to do a bad job is trying to please everybody. People have very particular opinons about audio and they don’t usually know how to express them very well so for sure take the feedback, but not at face value or you will go crazy.
Leaning on your own opinion all the time sometimes feels like that Nietzsche quote "if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you", but is probably your best bet. Firstly because you will always be improving as you flex your creative muscle. And secondly, and most importantly, because you is the only constant in your career. Leaning on the only tool you will always, always have seems like a good idea to me.
Or if everything else fails, you can always take a break.