Forum - Week 8 - Peter Dowdall and Sound Engineering

This week took me back to the glories of first year, where Forum involved industry professionals presenting their work and experience to us. It was a most welcome flashback, particularly with Peter being so experienced and successful in the industry. His work for Pepsi's Superbowl advertisement exemplified the exorbitant amount of money and effort that can be required for a simple 30 second advert. It was also a little disconcerting, as the complete commercialisation of music apparently results in the removal of many the musical or lexical normalities that we as students have been trained to pay special attention to retaining. In the Pepsi example, there was basically no dynamics of sound, with horrific over-compression present throughout, and some of the singing had the ends of words cut off, just to appease the music. While the money would be lovely, I would feel as if I had sold my soul should I ever participate in such a blatantly non-musical music industry.

Dowdall, Peter. “Sound Engineering and Session Management.” Lecture presented at EMU space, University of Adelaide, level 5, Schultz Building, 8th of May 2008.