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The interview starts off discussing the stereotype of the grumpy sound engineer, and where it might have come from. After some thoughts on stereotypes, they attempted a proper introduction for Gilly Moon. She is an audio engineer and sound designer based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds her MFA in Sound Design from California Institute of the Arts, where she did sound design for theater, themed entertainment, film, animation and spatial audio. After graduating in 2016, her wide range of interests led her to doing a lot of work for themed entertainment attractions, such as Halloween Horror Nights and San Diego Comic Con. In 2018, Gilly and her co-sound designer won an Ovation Award for Excellence in Sound Design for Rogue Artist Ensemble's "Kaidan: Walls Grow Thin," an immersive Japanese horror production that spanned three floors of a warehouse. Gilly currently works as a Broadcast recording Technician for NPR.

Tangela asks Gilly about the general advice in the industry about niching down.

"I find that there are a good number of people that do not do that, and you are one of them! ... Was that on purpose? ... How'd that come to be?"

After some discussion about each of their academic and career histories, they concluded that while a person's career can seem to lack a defined niche, oftentimes there's a common thread that ties things together.

Tangela asks Gilly how she developed an interest in audio. That sparked an involved discussion about both their backgrounds in theater. From there they move on to a discussion about resources for training your ear to be a better audio engineer.

Gilly says she really enjoyed listening to these past episodes.

After discussing podcast format, Tangela makes the case that the podcast industry still has a lot of growing room in comparison to other industries like cinema and gaming.

From there they spend some time discussing the accessibility of recording and the different pros and cons of Apple products.

Gilly wrote a blog post for Sound Girls a while ago about language and biases in audio that Tangela wanted to dig into.

They cover a variety of specific examples of biased language before getting around to the question of, is there "an end point to trying to transform the audio world ... without it just turning into ... a clutter bucket of tomfoolery ... ?"

Gilly explains the point of Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives, concluding with "I don't think there's an end goal, I think we're always gonna be looking at our group and being like, 'what does it look like right now, ok how can I make it better?' And I think that's kinda fun."

Tangela wonders what diversity means outside of metropolitan areas. After riffing on that, they tackle the idea of "minorities are expected to take on the work of diversifying a predominantly white place often," in Gilly's words.

Tangela points out to Gilly that a lot of her questions are meant to be open ended and don't necessitate an answer in this moment. The point of the her questions tends to be "are we thinking about it? ... if we don't have an answer, why don't we have an answer, and why haven't we thought about it?"

Tangela: "I think there is a time and a place for everything, and sometimes it is neither the time nor the place nor the person ... You gotta find the right people to ask, you gotta find the right time to ask them."

Gilly's closing thought is a reflection on her early experiences in audio. "If anyone's in a place right now that they're not being talked to the right way, don't pick up that habit and keep it going. We all tend to take lessons and run with them and say 'o this is how I was treated' ... the way we talk to each other sometimes in production is not the way we have to talk to each other."

This episode was recorded on February 9 through Squadcast.fm.

Gilly can be found at

Portfolio

LinkedIn

IG @gillymakessound

Twitter @takewing14

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As usual you can find Tangela on her website where you can sign up for the Newsletter!