Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545099
44 M PS E . O R G arol Urban MPSE CAS is arguably one of the hardest working people in Hollywood Audio Post Production. Her Emmy-, CAS-, and MPSE-nominated work includes re-recording mixing, sound editing and sound supervision on features and episodics. She also has served the post audio community as former President of the Cinema Audio Society, and presently as a member of the Board of Directors for the Motion Picture Editors Guild. She graciously spent some time with Wavelength to tell us and our readers about her fascinating journey so far in the world of sound. Karol, What made you want to do sound for picture? For much of my early childhood, I relied heavily on my sense of hearing to understand the world around me due to a muscular deformity in my eyes. I struggled to perceive depth, distance, and spatial relationships visually until corrective surgeries and years of physical therapy helped stabilize my vision around age 6. Because of that, my sense of hearing became deeply tied to my understanding of space, memory, emotion, and storytelling. I remember the sonic textures of my childhood long before I remember visual details. Even now, sound gives emotional depth and nuance to my experience of the world in a way sight never fully has. My mother was a special education teacher and a tremendous advocate for me. Wanting to nurture my understandable draw and love of sound, she encouraged me to audition for the Governor's School for the Arts, a public magnet arts program in Virginia. I was accepted and spent my high school years moving between the normal math, history, and English classes in the morning and dance studios, theater spaces, rehearsal rooms, and, most influential to me, the music recording studio in the afternoon and evening. I've always loved stories. Discussion of story structure and character development in my English classes are some of my favorite memories of school. But science runs deep in my family and acoustics and psychology both have always been of great interest. At the Performing Arts School, music and music theory fascinated me the most. Not the performance aspect per se, but the sound of the space and the emotion hidden amongst the notes, the musician, and the environment. As a teenager, I was writing music, hiring musicians, running recording sessions, and experimenting with storytelling through sound. I loved experimenting with the emotional K