Fade (audio engineering)

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In audio engineering, a fade is a gradual increase or decrease in the volume of a source. The term can be used as either a verb or a noun. A song may be gradually reduced to silence at its end (fade-out), or may gradually increase from silence at the beginning (fade-in). Fading-out can serve as a recording solution for pieces of music that contain no obvious ending.

"For Henri Lefebvre (1971a:19), 'everyday life in the modern world' is a privileged site for the crucial fact of recurrence. The question of how to end a song now becomes pressing. The answer, often, is not to end: the harmonically inconclusive or artificially abrupt finish, or - quintessentially - the fade. As Sean Cubitt points out (1984: 210), this refers us"

to the activity of the auditor, with whom lies the only available fulfillment...[It] pledges that the performer...has an existence beyond the recording...This refusal of completion refers us, not back into the song, as is the case with the classic aesthetic object but outwards to the ways in which the song is heard.

"At the meta-song level, the prevalence of pre-taped sequences (for shops, pubs, parties, concert intervals, aircraft headsets) emphasizes the importance of flow. The effect on radio pop programme form [is] a stress on continuity achieved through the use of fades, voice-over links, twin-turntable mixing and connecting jingles."

A fader is any device used to accomplish this task, especially when it is a knob or button that slides along a track or slot. A knob which rotates is usually not considered a fader, although it is electrically and functionally equivalent. A fader can be either analogue, directly controlling the resistance or impedance to the source; or digital, numerically controlling a digital signal processor (DSP).

There are many software applications that will allow you to crossfade songs if you want to burn them onto a CD.

A crossfader essentially functions like two faders connected side-by-side to each other, but in opposite directions. It allows a DJ to fade one source out while fading another source in at the same time. This is extremely useful when beatmatching two phonograph records or compact discs.

The term fade is also used in multi-speaker audio systems to describe the balancing of power between front and rear channels.

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