Chances are, if you hear sound through anything other than the speaker inside of your desktop tower, you probably have at least stereo sound. That’s good.
You might notice that when you watch Gone in 60 Seconds, some car sounds travel from one speaker to the next as it passes by. This is called the end of Nicholas Cage’s career but also the sound mixing technique is called panning.
In a continuing effort to waste your time I have devised a preset that will automatically PAN a sound or music based on a layers screen space position. I’m still working out a few bugs but I’ll post the presets when I can. My mind has been thinking about expressions a lot lately and I might have some more experiments to post as well. Until then.
UPDATE:
Here are the settings used for this comp. You can control the low & high output so that the audio doesn’t cut out completely. I probably wouldn’t mix my audio in AE but this was a fun experiment indeed. With a little more work it could be setup like the 3D falloff preset to fade the audio as the object travels away in Z space. Right now it is screen space (2d).