Embiggening Your Sound with Stereo Widening

As I continue tweaking and twerking (am I saying that right?) my latest song, Sundown Ride, I find myself trying to ’embiggen’ the sound – making it seem to surround the listener, if possible.

The journey to get better at doing this led me on a quest to discover the secret of stereo widening. Basically I read a small collection of online articles and Reddit forums, and looked for commonalities between them that also matched up with my experiences.

If you want to really sink your teeth into this stuff, just scroll to the bottom to check out the articles. Otherwise, read on, brave soul!

What the Heck is Stereo Widening?

Picture, if you will, a beautiful forest spreading out before you in every direction, from your comfortable spot atop a grassy knoll.

No, no, too cold. Go warmer and greener.

The forest is full of wildlife, drifting to you from every direction. Some sounds are nearby, others are far away, and you can hear them to the front, right, left, and even behind you. You even hear bird calls from above and various rustlings below.

In short, you are experiencing the sound of the forest in 3D. This three-dimensional perception of sound is called the stereo field.

Musicians take advantage of the stereo field to make music an immersive experience – as though you were swimming in it rather than passively listening.

They do this through the magic and mystery of stereo widening. As a side note, the opposite of stereo sound is what we call mono, but more on that later.

Unfortunately, you can’t just turn a knob to make everything go all stereo-like. Different tricks are used to create each dimension of sound:

For height, we rely on higher and lower pitches. For reasons that elude this writer, we tend to perceive higher pitches as coming from above, while lower sounds seem to come from our toes. Not literally, but you get the idea.
For width, panning is the most common tool used – it creates an almost infinitesimal delay between the right ear and the left. If for example, a bird chirps near our right ear, we would hear it in that ear slightly before the left one, and thus detect the sound as coming from the right.
Finally depth is a bit more complicated. We tend to perceive anything that is louder and ‘brighter’ (containing more high-pitched frequencies) as being closer, and quieter, darker, and more echo-y sounds as farther away. The latter is commonly created using reverb and delay effects, which is another article altogether.

If all that wasn’t complicated enough, it generally helps if the listener also has points of contrast. Put simply, it’s easier to tell if something sounds closer if we can compare it to something farther away, or something to the left compared to the centre or right.

The final tricky thing to consider in this VERY brief overview of stereo widening, is that no matter how wide you make your sound, it’s a good idea to make sure it will still sound good in mono. Awesome as stereo is, many bars, iphones, bathrooms, etc. still use mono sound.

Coming back to our forest metaphor, mono would be like having on some kind of weird helmet that blocked all sound except that which entered from the front. Despite this however, we would still hope to hear all the sounds of the forest.

Obviously there’s no way to prevent at least some loss of sound this way, but a wise artist will make sure that no part of their mix is so cut off from mono that it unbalances their mix. I’ve heard badly mixed songs in mono before, and I’ll tell you, it sucks.