Place sounds. Shape their relationships.

Where should this sound live?

You can hear that something is in the wrong place: the lead is too far back, or two parts crowd the same spot. But the fix is not obvious. Turning it up makes it loud without making it close, and reaching for reverb or width can trade one problem for another.

What you want is a placement. What comes forward, what sits behind it, and how wide the picture can be without losing its centre.

Field Engine gives that decision one shared view. Every sound in your session appears as an object on a single field, with depth and width in the same place. You move an object, listen to what changes, and keep the move only if your ears agree.

Field Engine is one product. Field Feed is the small track-side component that places each track on the field. It is installed with Field Engine and is included in the price.

One problem, one move, before and after

The most useful way to judge Field Engine is not a feature tour. Take one short passage where a depth or width relationship feels unclear, and make a single deliberate change.

1. Play a short passage where something sits in the wrong place.
2. Listen to it as it is, without changing anything.
3. Select the sound on the field and make one placement decision.
4. Bypass or undo the move, then listen again.

The question is whether seeing the relationship helped you reach a better decision with less searching.

The walkthrough shows the workflow in a Logic Pro session: sounds placed on the field, one selected, groups and views. You make the before/after comparison on your own material with the free demo.

A question explored through research

How could a mixing interface reflect the way people imagine a musical scene?

The idea began around 2003–2004, when Morten Büchert imagined a three-dimensional chessboard on which musical elements could be placed as objects. Their positions would express relationships: depth, width and a visual sense of how the music belonged together.

The intention was to help people explore a balance through listening and placement, without first having to understand every technical step. Distance meant the experience of a sound being further away, beyond a change in level alone.

Büchert approached Steven Gelineck, PhD researcher at Aalborg University, to ask whether the idea could be built, and Jesper Andersen, Associate Professor at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen, subsequently joined the collaboration. Research became part of the journey from that initial musical idea towards a practical tool.

The research background includes work on stage-based mixing interfaces: Towards an Interface for Music Mixing based on Smart Tangibles and Multitouch (Gelineck, Overholt, Büchert and Andersen, NIME 2013) and Stage Metaphor Mixing on a Multi-Touch Tablet Device (Gelineck, Korsgaard, Büchert and Andersen, AES Convention 137, 2014).

That history gives context to the design question. The papers describe the research prototypes of the time, not the released Field Engine product. The walkthrough above shows what Field Engine does today.

Frequently asked questions