Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543070
42 S P R I N G 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Audio Post in an AI Future b y C A S A s s o c i a t e K e v i n K o h r L-R: Brian Vessa, Alexandra Fehrman CAS, Brent Findley CAS MPSE, Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS MPSE, and Bradford Swanson Ask any mixer what they love most about their craft and you'll get surprisingly intimate answers. Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS MPSE answers simply with, "Put- ting the sound in the rectangle." For Brent Findley CAS MPSE, it's about story- telling—and he's adamant that no algorithm should help him tell that story. "If the machine's doing it, why do I get up?" he asks, capturing a fear that haunts mixing stages everywhere. His favorite moments come when clients think what they're hearing was captured during the shoot, the power of movie magic. At the panel discussion moderated by Pro Sound Effects' Bradford Swanson, Alexandra Fehrman CAS highlighted something deeper: the process of discovery. "We try different methods to achieve that," she explains, "and I feel like technology is threatening to take that away because people will instead just regurgitate things they've already seen or heard before rather than feeling it out with us on the stage." Sony's Brian Vessa agrees, but takes it further: It's about building dynamics, the crescendos and decrescendos that guide audience attention. "How we play the music is very important, too," he notes. "We play it loud certain times, soft certain times. We use tensions in the music or relaxations, and how you play it out with the characters, the themes that the characters have." Yet for all their passion about the creative side, these professionals aren't luddites. They recognize plenty of mundane tasks that technology could handle. Brian wants AI (artificial intelligence) to tackle the tedious stuff: initial QC on stems before final print, checking for clicks or dropouts, logging issues, conforming. Alexandra dreams of machines that actually communicate with each other about their I/O situations—a seemingly basic request that remains frustratingly elusive. Brent's ultimate vision? "The ultimate noise reduction tool is the AI tool that eliminates the location scouts that are picking noisy locations." Now that's solving the problem at its source! The tools that are working well tend to be assistive rather than replacive. Alexandra uses several dialogue and noise