The Audio Engineer's EQ: On Carving Space for Each Voice

I was watching a friend, a recording engineer, at work in his studio. He was mixing a song with three vocalists, and the process was nothing like I’d imagined. It wasn’t about making everything louder. It was about making room. With a few subtle adjustments on his digital console—a tool called an equalizer, or EQ—he carved out a specific pocket of sound for each singer. He gently reduced the low frequencies for one, allowing their voice to sit crisply on top. For another, he trimmed a narrow band of mid-range where the first singer’s voice had its power, creating a notch for the second voice to slide into without clashing. He wasn’t adding; he was subtracting, with surgical precision, to prevent a muddy mess.

It struck me then that this is the precise, often unacknowledged, task of the writer working with multiple perspectives. Whether in a novel with several point-of-view characters or an essay weaving together disparate ideas, we face the same challenge as the audio engineer: how to make sure every voice is heard clearly, without them all blurring into a single, indistinct noise. The amateur writer, like the amateur mixer, often just turns up the volume. They make every character shout their motivations, every idea declare its importance in bold-faced prose. The result is cacophony. The professional knows that clarity comes from carving out space.

The Knobs and Sliders of Prose

So what are the writer’s equivalents of bass, mids, and treble? They are the elements of voice. The “low end” might be a character’s background, their history, the weight of their past. Giving one character a rich, resonant history means you might need to thin out another’s, implying theirs through selective detail rather than exhaustive exposition. The “mid-range” is the heat of the moment—a character’s immediate desires, their dialect, the rhythm of their speech. To avoid collision, you might adjust the vocabulary or syntax of a second character to be more formal or clipped, creating a distinct sonic texture.

And the “high end” is the glint of specificity, the unique observations, the sharp, surprising metaphors that belong to a particular consciousness. If two characters see the same sunset in the same uniquely poetic way, the mix becomes muddy. The EQ solution is to give one character a visual metaphor and the other a tactile one; one sees the sky as a “bruise,” while the other feels the air “cooling like metal.” Each voice occupies its own frequency, allowing the reader to distinguish them instantly, even without a dialogue tag.

This practice moves beyond character into the architecture of an argument. In nonfiction, each supporting point needs its own space on the frequency spectrum. One idea might be rooted in historical context (the low end), while the next is powered by a present-day example (the mid-range), and a third shines with a sharp, analytical conclusion (the high end). By consciously assigning different tonal qualities to our points, we prevent them from piling on top of one another, creating a layered and intelligible whole instead of a monotonous drone.

The audio engineer’s final test is to listen to the entire mix, ensuring no single element is fighting for dominance. Our final draft is the same. We read for voice, listening for the distinct timbre of each character, each idea. We ask ourselves not just what is being said, but how it’s occupying the space of the page. Are these voices harmonious, or are they stepping on each other’s lines? The goal is never silence, but a clear, compelling composition where every part, having been given its due space, can finally be heard.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: