Why is sound or music still considered as an afterthought?

Games and film makers who ignore audio in the name of being “new” to the industry, aren’t naive because they’re new. They’re naive because they don’t understand what a good gameplay or film experience is made up of. This is also the case with new YouTubers spending first on 8K camera instead of getting a 1/200th costing microphone. Audio is the lowest effort, highest impact element of any experience in all aspects, including the comparative load on CPU. Yet, it takes people decades to realise its potential. Why? Because hearing is a passive activity, and anything that we experience passively is ignored in its relevance by amateurs of an industry. Hence, we have research focussed on bringing 4k screens to our mobile devices thereby further improving people’s taste in quality of visuals, while there’s limited research in audio to bring affordable great listening devices. I’m probably saying this for the billionth time this decade. Today to experience good audio you still need either very expensive headphones or an actual studio, and so people’s taste in audio never develops. The brain never learns to identify high quality vs trashed up distorted audio. And in the meanwhile, the eyes can now detect even the subtle differences in 60FPS vs 120FPS. People say “I just know”. Well, for you to “just know”, you subconsciously had to experience it over and over again. For anyone in the audio industry fed up with audio being given less importance (despite being far too useful to get much better results in marketing, product & user experience, and storytelling), get the focus on affordable hardware research. Otherwise, audio will always be a premium aspect of a production — newbies & wannabes will never realise its value. But then again, pros are pros because they know and do things that others don’t. It’s not a coincidence that only biggest & successful brands in the world consider sonic branding, for example. It’s not a coincidence that great venues & offices focus a lot on acoustics of their rooms, even if it’s for meetings. Here’s yet another quote from me:

Subconscious is a playground for the experts. It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.