Animated Abstract HereThe beginning of the digital era in musical productions has brought endless changes to the industry. Today there are very sophisticated software tools for processing audio, which allow sound to be manipulated in a manner that was unthinkable in the previous period. In the analogue era, the tools were limited to the hardware available. But the democratization of tools for editing and processing audio in the digital era has meant that sound engineers have almost unlimited technical possibilities at hand, with the capacity to provide multiple finishes to the materials with which they work, thus having a decisive influence over the performance and aesthetic of the final product.
This study consists of empirically testing the assertion that sound engineersbring substantial meanings to sound recordings, which should be taken into account when evaluating them. Based on the theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Chion (1993), an experiment was designed and applied to a concert series in which the present author personally did the PA engineering and made the recordings. Different postproduction techniques were applied to each sound recording, in order to compare the results. The sample consisted of 12 recordings and two versions of each were made. This not only allowed for an evaluation of the capacity of current technology to dramatically transform a pre-existing sound recording, but to demonstrate that the study of sound has gradually become a musical instrument in itself (Corey, 2010; Bates, 2012). Sound engineers thus acquire expressive skills that place them on an equal status as sound artists, conductors or other musicians in the construction of musical works.
