Spencer Shafter is a sound designer & mix engineer originally hailing from Montana. He is currently the Vice President of HOBO Audio, one of NYC's best boutique post-production audio studios. He works on sound for advertising, broadcast TV, documentary, film, games & radio.
Shafter spent his bachelor's and master's degree studies at NYU Music Technology working in hardware development and 3D audio. Near the end of
his studies, he pivoted into working heavily with voice recording and eventually ADR which opened the door to the world of audio post. After interning at NYC's SuperExploder studios, he moved to HOBO Audio where he works today. As the studio's current Vice President, Shafter works both at the board mixing, under it soldering, or yelling into the booth's microphones crafting voices for ad work and narrative content alike. Along with the other HOBO engineers, Shafter lofted the studio to a remote-capable powerhouse with the advent of COVID-19. Since that time he has delved extensively into the world of remote audio, audio over IP, and finding creative solutions to collaborate from anywhere in the world on audio post projects for networks like HBO, A&E, and Discovery; and brands
like MARVEL, Anheuser Busch, Volkswagen, and Warner Brothers Interactive.
Shafter has maintained a relationship with academia from the beginning of his professional career. Teaching courses online, at Columbia University, and most prominently at NYU's Music Technology program. From 2018 through 2022, Shafter took over the direction of NYU Music Tech's summer programming.
Building upon a lineage of incredible foundations set by his predecessors, Shafter worked with other NYU administration to host SIMPT (Summer Institute of Music Production Technology) and SEMI (Summer Electronic Music Institute) in which high-school students from around the world traveled to NYC to see NYU Music Technology first-hand and experience truly multidisciplinary music-making and collaboration. Shafter took these programs online with the help of outstanding faculty members Scott Hirsch and Adam Rokhsar in 2020 and 2021. Today at NYU, Shafter teaches Audio for Video I & II, courses that cover early and intermediate forays into post-production audio as seen through the lens of both commercial and narrative production.