Brief Summary

We have a great deal of control over our DAWs. How might we use behavioural ‘nudges’ to help us make better decisions and avoid bad habits? Julian explores the options.

Going Deeper

I recently listened to a podcast during which Nudge Theory was discussed. It’s a phrase I wasn't previously very familiar with, but I thought it was very relevant to audio production and the tools that we use. What is it and how might it help us in our working practices?

What Is A Nudge?

Nudge Theory proposes that adaptive designs of the ‘choice architecture’ of the ‘decision environment’ is a way to influence the behaviour and decision making of groups or individuals. Nudging contrasts with other ways to influence behaviour, such as education or legislation.

Nudge theory was popularised in 2008 in the book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’. A nudge, according to authors Thaler and Sunstein, is any form of choice architecture that alters people's behaviour in a predictable way without restricting options or significantly changing their incentives. To count as a nudge, it must require minimal intervention and must be cheap to implement. Whether or not there was anything inherently new about Nudge Theory or whether it was just repackaging well known approaches is open to debate, but the theory is interesting and I couldn’t help considering how behavioural nudges might benefit audio production.

Selling the Idea

The effectiveness of nudges isn't lost on people who tried to sell us things. The most obvious environment we encounter every day which exploits behavioural nudges, in an often obvious way, is the supermarket. You can just pop in for a pint of milk, but they know perfectly well that if they make you walk through the whole shop to get to it, you're more likely to pick up something else on your way, when you remember you need that jar of coffee you'll only ever find the premium brands at eye level, with the value stuff down by your ankles.

These are all well known tricks and they are definitely nudges. No one is stopping us from buying the cheap stuff, no one is forcing us to buy anything extra when we go into the shop and it costs the supermarket nothing to use our own impatience and laziness against us to get us to spend that little bit more.

Can We Nudge Ourselves?

A problem which ultimately took legislation to solve was the Loudness War, at least for broadcast, but rather than concentrating on intractable issues of group behaviour, are there examples of how we, as individuals, can nudge our own behaviour to benefit us in our studios? Can we change the ‘choice architecture’ of our personal ‘decision environment’?

There are three principal elements to choice architecture:

• The number of choices presented

• The manner in which attributes are described

• The presence of a “default”

A DAW is one huge ‘choice architecture’. The quality of the results of different DAWs are effectively indistinguishable, but the way different choices are navigated differs hugely from one DAW to another.

What about all of those thousands of tiny decisions that we make during a mix? Are there nudges which either software developers or we as users can implement to encourage better decisions? We hear general advice about our work environments and ways we can encourage better concentration, fewer interruptions and greater productivity all the time: Limit phone use, switch off notifications, take regular breaks. All of these things really help but once we're in a creative flow and are performing that most prized of activities  - productive work, what tweaks can we and those people who create the tools we use make to help us make better choices?

We're all familiar with the phrase ‘option paralysis’. More choice isn't necessarily better and we are all influenced by what we hear and see. We like to think we're objective, but we really aren’t. Taking each of the principal elements of choice architecture in turn, here are some areas in which software can nudge our decisions in a constructive way:

The Number Of Choices Presented

One of the most common complaints made by users of digital audio workstations when it comes to actually using them is that of counter-productive amounts of choice. Nowhere is this more apparent than when using plug-ins. Presets are a principal culprit here. They have their place, but if a product tries to present having thousands of presets as a positive, I'm afraid I can't agree.

However, I’ve never really been much of a preset person, preferring to set things up from scratch for all but the most complex of plug-ins. The excessive choice that affects almost everybody is found in selecting plug-ins in the first place, and luckily most DAWs offer ways to control this. Actually all of them do if you are prepared to just go in to your plug-ins folder and remove stuff you don’t use. This doesn't have to be as much of a commitment as it sounds as if you just move them to another folder then they won't appear in the list but can be easily moved back into your plug-in folder should you need them back again quickly.

Many DAW's offer ways to customise plug-in lists. For example Pro Tools allows the addition of favourites at the top of plug-in lists. Just Command+click on any plug-in in your list, and it will be promoted to a separate section at the top of the plug-in menu. To un-favourite it, simply command+click on it in it's promoted position.

Another fantastically effective way to minimise decisions around plug-in selection is of course to use a template. For people doing work which necessitates complex routing templates are virtually mandatory, but if you're happy creating sessions as you go for simple stereo workflows, it's still a great reason to use a template.

The Manner In Which Attributes Are Described

Metering is really important. Something I was very aware of in my teaching days was the fact that my students mixed hotter in Logic Pro than they did in Pro Tools. A significant factor in this difference I'm sure was in the metering. This was some years ago and Logic’s metering has improved a little but in those days (pre Logic Pro X) the meter scaling seemed to encourage hotter levels, often to the point of it becoming a problem. 

An experienced mixer should of course be well versed in managing headroom within a DAW but, as well as offering 17 different Peak, VU PPM and K metering types, the extremely customisable metering in Pro Tools also offers control over the colour break points, so if you want your meters to show you when you’re over -16dBFS, you can set it up to suit.

We must all have experienced that moment where we are dialling in an EQ and we look at the curve and ask ourselves whether we've made a good choice because the shape of the curve doesn't match our expectations. The simplest way to avoid this is probably to choose an EQ that doesn't have a graph display at all. However, far fewer of us actually do this than have thought this and, however happy I am to have EQs which are based on 50-year-old hardware, I'm still extremely glad that I have Pro-Q3 as well. I for one would be reluctant to give up my modern equalisers.

Pro-Q3 is one of many modern equalisers, which allows you to customise the gain range of the EQ curve. Anyone who has ever seen a politician try to present some data in an impactful way will know the effect manipulating the scale of the axes of a graph can have on how the results look and exactly the same is true of an EQ curve. Considering how all of us are susceptible to the influence of visual feedback if you are someone who sees a dramatic, looking EQ curve and starts to question whether or not, you have made a mistake, perhaps change the scale of your EQ to be coarser. That probably wouldn't be appropriate in all cases, but this is a matter of personalising your environment through nudges which influence choices after all.

The Presence Of A “Default”

A default choice, one which it takes a conscious decision not to take, is a powerful way to influence decisions. Anyone who has ever ‘chosen’ their insurance because of an auto-renewal knows how easy it is for others to exploit our inaction.

All plugins feature a factory default setting, and these aren't chosen at random. We've all had that experience of instantiating a plug-in and nodding approvingly, thinking “Yeah that will do”. Factory defaults are often chosen with great care and skill and there's nothing wrong with using them. However, if you are a control freak (and if you're an audio engineer, you probably are a control freak..) then it is very easy to set up a user default and to set a plug-in to instantiate with the user default rather than the factory default.

My favourite example of this is something I've been doing for many years in Pro Tools. Xpand! 2 is a great instrument for everyday use, but the factory default patch ‘Beneath The Waves’ is a sound that I never ever want but stubbornly presents itself every time you open the instrument. Years ago I changed this so that when instantiating Xpand! 2 it opens with an electric piano patch. The electric piano patch is rarely the right patch, but the ponderous, slow swelling pad sound of Beneath The Waves is never the right patch.

A really practical default that you can set in Pro Tools, and presumably other DAWs, is my solution to that well known bad habit many people suffer when mixing - spending too long listening to tracks in solo. We all know that how individual tracks sound in isolation isn't particularly relevant in mixing. How things sound in context with all the other elements of the mix is how progress should be judged, but most of us still spend longer than we should with tracks soloed.

In Pro Tools Ultimate you have the option of setting solo to Momentary. This non-latching mode is the perfect way to stop you from absent-mindedly over-using solo. It works with track selections so if you need to momentarily solo multiple tracks you can select them and use Option+Shift for Do To Selected. It works and Solo Mode persists between sessions rather than being saved with them.

We all know how we should behave. Tweaking our environment to steer us in the right direction without us needing to actively decide anything is a great way to make better decisions more of the time. Are there any things you do in your studio which could be described as behavioural nudges?