3.8 Depth
As your music plays back through the speakers, some voices and instruments will appear to be closer to you than others.
Kind: concept (reamix-section) Chapter: 3 Spatial Mixing Source: ReaMix (October 2009)
As your music plays back through the speakers, some voices and instruments will appear to be closer to you than others. If you like, you can think of this illusion of depth as being conceptually similar to the illusion of depth that will be created by a landscape painter.
Time
Like height, time is a dimension to which sufficient attention is often not given. Your mix should not resemble a static snapshot, but should behave dynamically through time.
As you begin to understand that sound operates across these four dimensions, you will grow to appreciate why each of these is important, and why the manner of combination of these different dimensions matters.
The dimension of depth is used to create the illusion in the listener’s ears that some instruments are closer or further away in the mix. You might at first think that this dimension at least would be an easy one to fix. After all, the closer a sound is, the louder it sounds, right? So surely, it’s basically a question of just turning the volume up or down on different instruments, yes?
Well, no, actually. Before you can begin to understand how to manipulate the dimension of depth, you need to understand two important facts.
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Different frequencies decay through space at different rates. This means that as you move closer to or further from a sound, the relative levels of different frequencies will change. As a rule, higher frequencies decay at a faster rate than lower frequencies. That is why when a distant sound first approaches you, depending on the physical environment, you may find that hear only the bass frequencies at first, or in other circumstances the higher frequencies first, with the total picture filling out as the sound gets closer and closer.
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The clarity of sound deteriorates with distance. Put another way, the more distant a sound, the more it appears muffled. This happens not by any absolute factor, but according to the environment in which the sound is being produced and heard.
From this we can draw a number of inferences, but in particular this:
Making an instrument seem closer to us or further away in a mix is an illusion that can seldom be created satisfactorily by adjusting the volume of that instrument alone.
Let’s then take a look at the tools that we do have at our disposal.