Balancing Audio: Towards a Cognitive Structure of Sound Interaction in Music Production

This paper explores the concept of balance in music production and examines the role of conceptual metaphors in reasoning about audio editing. Balance may be the most central concept in record production, however, the way we cognitively understand and respond meaningfully to a mix requiring balance is not thoroughly understood. In this paper I treat balance as a metaphor that we use to reason about several different actions in music production, such as adjusting levels, editing the frequency spectrum or the spatiality of the recording. This study is based on an exploration of a linguistic corpus of sound engineering literature. Using this corpus I show how corpus data may contribute to better understand the relation between embodied patterns of experience and hands-on interaction with sound.