Providing music composition, sound design, music supervision, sonic branding and audio post services from premises in New York City, Santa Monica and Paris Multimedia audio firm Human (and sister company Post Human) aims to take clients’ projects from concept to completion. This year, the company has begun what will become a complete refurbishment of its audio monitoring infrastructure, using a combination of Genelec’s 8341A and 8351B Smart Active Monitors, part of the brand’s The Ones line.
A group of award-winning composers, artists and producers populate Human, the production side of the company that creates music and other audio elements for advertising, video, digital and film projects. Post Human takes the firm’s decade-plus of experience and creativity to the world of audio postproduction, offering a suite of post services, including 5.1 mixing, music supervision and sound design.
The move to The Ones began at the personal studio facility of Sloan Alexander, a Partner and Senior Mix Engineer at Post Human, and Composer, Sound Designer & Creative Director at Human. ‘I’ve used almost every kind of speaker there is in my career, starting with the Genelec 1029A in the 2000s, and I’ve found that choosing a monitor speaker is a journey and you learn as you go,’ he says. ‘But especially in the past four or five years, I’ve watched as the listening experience has been transformed as people shifted to a wide range of devices through which they consume media, from iPhones to tablets to smart speakers.’
Alexander recognises that mixes have to be accurately and to reliably translate between not only various devices but also a variety of environments. ‘As we move further into mixing for multiple kinds of devices, I think the mixing environment itself become less and less critical – it is the transition between devices that are more important,’ he says. ‘It was taking the room out of the monitoring equation, which made the monitor speaker itself so much more critical. That’s where The Ones became so important: they were the link between so many different kinds of devices and mixing environments.
‘A lot of high-end speakers can actually hype every little detail, which can be a distracting jumble and, ultimately, not an accurate mix,’ he continues. ‘The Ones give you the bigger picture, the complete picture, but also one in which you can hear necessary details like compression and dialogue artefacts. And the results really translate into something that clients can wrap their heads (and ears) around. When you can trust the speaker, the client can trust the entire process.’
Alexander says the company’s offices will be kitted out with combinations of 8341A and 8351B monitors in coming months, including rooms that will eventually have immersive mix capabilities. He says they will also rely on Genelec’s GLM Auto-Cal software to assure that every monitoring array they install is perfectly tailored to each control room. ‘The GLM 4 software update is something I really appreciate,’ he says. ‘The room-correction software notices the little anomalies of a room and smooths them out even better than before.’
More: www.genelec.com
