Long time ago I took a short course in video production. For the first time I had the conscious experience to notice that in western civilization we have a left to right horizontal directionality to the way we see, read, write, build, and evaluate things in life. Music, pictures and sound don’t seem to escape this way of thinking and doing things. For example: We write from left to right; of course, we also read that way.

In general, when we open a newspaper or magazine the advertisements are to the right and the articles are to the left. This is because they don’t sell articles, they sell advertisements. You can miss what is on the left but when you are ready to turn from the even page to the next odd one it is hard to miss the advertisement on the right. It is as though all they’re waiting for you to do is to turn the page. This is why an advertisement on the right page of a newspaper or magazine costs more than the one positioned to the left.

In Television, the instructor teachs us that the interviewer appears on the right and the guest to the left.
In engineering, the left cable is negative and the right one is positive.

In music, symphony orchestra instruments that play the bigger melodic role, (first violin) traditionally are positioning to the left, and the least active section in terms of melodic movements, the contrabass, are to the right, which by the way, is located differently than today’s center bass placement in creative virtual mixing stereophonic image. (In my next life I’m going to be a conductor and going to find a way to place the bass section in the symphony orchestra to the center. Just joking!)

How does this ralate to you?

To me. From an objective and a subjective point of view, the traditional bass placement in the classical music sounds really unbalanced from the stereophonic and frequencies balance placement in live concerts and recordings. But this belongs to another subject. Let’s get back to the horizontal western orientation.

In a chamber music ensemble, woodwinds, brasses or strings the main instrument appears to be to the left and its counterpart to the right. Of course, all the above examples have their own exceptions to the rules. But wow! When, how and where did all these ways of thinking start in our psychology and psychoacoustic foundation? Perhaps is it the natural way that the left and right brain function?

When I’m mixing, with the exception of the lead vocal and the bass, I always try to remember this repeatable pattern in our horizontal cultural orientation that we have in the way of thinking, watching, writing, reading, building and etc, etc. It is better when we break the rule based on knowledge of the standard rule that we are breaking.

Based in this horizontal orientation, the first choice for spatial effects in the mix for me starts on the left. Accompanying harmonic instruments or rhythms, whichever are busier, are positioned to the left, and their counterparts to the right. Now, do my clients pay me more for that? No. I’m just translating the phenomenon to the psychoacoustic area of the cultural, horizontal, western orientation. And sometimes, I just like to break the rule to bring some attention to the listener.