Audio Ducking
Automatically lowering background music's volume while speech is present, then restoring it after.
Audio ducking automatically lowers a background track's volume — typically music — whenever a foreground track like narration is present, then restores it once the speech ends. It's what keeps a voiceover intelligible over a music bed without silencing the music outright.
Ducking is usually driven by the presence of speech on another track rather than manual keyframing, so the mix adapts automatically as a script changes.
See also: Loudness Normalization (LUFS), Waveform.
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DownloadFrequently asked questions
Audio ducking automatically lowers a background track's volume — usually music — whenever another track, like narration, is present, then brings it back up once the speech ends.
Without ducking, a music bed and a voiceover fight for the same frequency space, making narration harder to understand. Ducking keeps dialogue intelligible without muting the music entirely.