The next time you hear a pounding drumbeat, showstopping keyboard solo, or electrifying guitar lick, you might have Athena Wilkinson ’15 to thank for making it sound so good. A Colorado-based audio engineer, Wilkinson and the team at Evergroove Studio produce albums for indie-folk groups, hard rock bands, classical ensembles, and everyone in between, always striving to put listeners inside the music.

      “It was a little bit by mistake,” says Wilkinson of the path that led her to a career in audio production. Already passionate about music when she arrived at Taft, she needed a little encouragement from classmate Zoë Klimley to convince her to enroll in guitar lessons. These soon developed into songwriting and recording sessions—including lessons with influential guitar teacher Fred Krug ’95—and, coupled with her time singing in Collegium under the great Bruce Fifer, confirmed that she had a future in the music industry.

      After graduation, Wilkinson continued her education at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, and at the same time, she interned at Evergroove. There, in addition to taking out the trash and cleaning the floors, she received valuable firsthand training setting up microphones in the recording studio, helping with vocal tuning, and working directly with clients. It was such a formative experience that, just a few years later, she found herself back at Evergroove as a full-time engineer.

      For Wilkinson, listening lies at the heart of her craft. “Our job is to realize the artists’ vision for the music. Whatever they hear in their heads, we want to achieve that sound,” she explains. A typical album can take up to 10 eight-hour sessions to record, followed by weeks of mixing and mastering, and at every step, Wilkinson and her colleagues are in close contact with the client. “We might give production ideas or suggestions, but in our minds, the music always comes first, not our egos. It ends up being a very collaborative process.”

      Evergroove specializes in the use of immersive Dolby Atmos technology, a new format that adds height channels to give added dimension to traditional surround sound. Wilkinson describes her first time hearing the spatial audio format as a light-switch moment. “I almost cried,” she recalls. “It viscerally placed me inside of the music in a way that I have never experienced before.” 

      Working with hundreds of individual instrument tracks—including strings, keyboards, flute, bagpipe, cittern, saz, melodica, handpan, percussion, and vocals—Wilkinson recently helped produce the Dolby Atmos mix for David Arkenstone’s sweeping fantasy album Quest for the Runestone. “It was particularly exciting to hear that music performed in a Dolby theater—the kind of space that this music is meant for,” she says. “It was so powerful and such a special moment in my career, to be able to step back and say, ‘I did this.’”

      Wilkinson also contributed to Aaron Lazar’s Impossible Dream, featuring Josh Groban, Kristin Chenoweth, Lin Manuel Miranda, and dozens of Broadway superstars. That project earned a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, but greater than any accolade is the satisfaction she derives from helping clients realize their musical dreams. “So many artists have told us, after listening to their work mixed in Atmos, that they’ve always wanted their music to sound like that, and now it can. It’s life changing in so many ways!”