Post Production Sound takes a project-oriented approach to audio post-production: the assembly, repair, and mixing of sound for film, television, and video, together with CD mastering and surround sound mixing. Students work with dialogue, sound effects, and music as separate elements and learn to combine them into a finished soundtrack that supports picture.
Within the SCNS taxonomy, MUM is the Music: Commercial/Music Production prefix. This course sits late in an audio production program, after the audio engineering sequence — Daytona State requires MUM2609 — and represents a distinct professional specialization rather than an extension of music recording. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions. Daytona State publishes it at 3 credits and offers it in spring.
The shift from music production to post is larger than students expect. Music mixing serves the music; post-production sound serves the picture and the story, and the measure of success is different — the best post work is frequently the work an audience does not notice. It is also the part of the audio industry with the most consistent employment, because every piece of visual media made needs it.
Florida course inventories carry this as MUM2640C, the integrated lecture-and-laboratory form. Daytona State publishes MUM2640 without the C at 3 credits. SCNS equivalency does not cross numbers, and the suffix is part of the number — the two forms carry different published contact hours even where the content matches. Confirm the value on your own institution's catalog page.
If a viewer cannot understand the words, nothing else in the soundtrack matters. This sounds obvious and is the most common failure in student and low-budget work, because the people mixing know what the line says and therefore hear it clearly when an audience would not.
The practical consequences: dialogue sits at the centre of the mix and everything else is arranged around it; music and effects duck for dialogue rather than competing with it; and the mix must be checked on small, poor speakers — a phone, a laptop, a television — because that is what most of the audience will use. Checking in mono is also essential, since much casual viewing is effectively mono.
The related discipline is audience-proofing the check: play the mix for someone who has not heard the lines. The moment they ask "what did he say?" you have found a problem you could not hear yourself.
This is the most concrete deliverable requirement in the course and it is frequently under-taught.
In the United States, the CALM Act requires broadcasters to control the loudness of commercials relative to programming, implemented through the ATSC A/85 recommended practice. Broadcast delivery is measured in LKFS/LUFS against a stated target, and a programme delivered off-spec is rejected — not adjusted. Streaming platforms each publish their own loudness targets and apply normalization, which means a master mixed hot is simply turned down.
What a student needs to take away: read the delivery specification before you start mixing, meter to it throughout rather than at the end, and understand that "it sounds right" is not a delivery standard. Specific numeric targets differ by platform and have changed over time — rule 11 applies; verify the current specification from the broadcaster or platform rather than from a textbook or this guide.
Worth stating because students orient toward music. Every piece of visual media made requires audio post — every advertisement, corporate video, training module, documentary, streaming series, and podcast. The volume is enormous and the work is continuous, in contrast to the music recording sector's contraction.
It is also more learnable as a career because the skills are specifiable: an employer can state that they need someone who can clean production dialogue in RX, cut effects to picture, and deliver to a stated loudness spec. That is a checkable competency, unlike "has good taste in mixing." Students who want reliable audio employment should take this course seriously as the practical option it is.
Two Florida notes. Orlando's themed entertainment sector employs sound designers and mixers at scale and is genuinely distinctive to this state. And honestly: Florida's film and television production incentive program ended some years ago and the state's screen production sector contracted as a result — students planning around narrative film work in Florida should verify the current landscape rather than assume, and should note that advertising, corporate, and themed entertainment work were far less affected.
The same caution that attaches to sampling applies here in a different form. Placing a commercial recording under picture requires two licences — a synchronization licence for the composition and a master use licence for the recording. Student and festival exhibition does not exempt a project, and a film that cannot clear its music cannot be distributed, which makes it useless as a portfolio piece.
The workable alternatives are the ones professionals use: production music libraries, properly licensed Creative Commons material with the terms actually read, or original score. Students should also learn to keep a cue sheet — the document listing every piece of music, its duration, and its rights holder — because it is a real deliverable in professional work.
Daytona State publishes MUM2640 at 3 credits, prerequisite MUM2609, offered in spring. The 60 contact hours reported here reflects the C-suffixed integrated form carried in the statewide inventory, at the 20-hours-per-credit convention this repository's MUM integrated courses use (MUM2600C at 3 credits / 60 hours). Confirm on your own syllabus.
Assessment is project-based: students take supplied picture and build a complete soundtrack — dialogue edited, effects designed, Foley recorded, music placed, mixed and delivered to specification. Expect the deadline to be enforced, because in post the delivery date is the whole business. Booked suite time outside scheduled hours is normally expected.
The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.
Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026