SOUND ENGINEER
The term "engineer" here comes from the times in which recording devices were expensive, huge, difficult to work and fragile.
A "sound engineer" was really some kind of an electrician then.
Nowadays it's not exactly the same issue. Recording devices are quite reliable, and the "sound engineer" guy is often a musician as well.
It's kind of difficult to define what is really a sound engineer. All those tasks are related to sound engineering, for instance :
- mixing a piece of music
- recording an orchestra
- synchronizing a sound track with animated pictures
- taking care of the monitors during a live show
- being able to deal with a PA installation
- cutting speech in ProTools
etc etc etc.
In music, there are many "sound engineers" usually involved in the project, from the studio assistant to the mastering engineer.
The term "sound engineer" doesn't really mean anything anymore.In some cases, the "sound engineer" has been slowly evolving into the "producer".