Dan Dugan (born March 20, 1943) is an American audio engineer, inventor, and nature sounds recordist.

He was the first person in regional theatre to be called a sound designer, and he developed the first effective automatic microphone mixer: the automixer.

Dugan became interested in achieving the automatic adjustment of sound controls after a frustrating experience staging the musical Hair.

Dugan devised a third improvement which helped prevent audio feedback in the presence of sound reinforcement loudspeakers.

Dugan is a co-founder and current secretary of People for Legal and Nonsectarian Schools (PLANS), a California non-profit organization incorporated in 1997.

"Dan" Dugan was raised in San Diego where his parents took him to the Old Globe Theatre and summer musicals at the Ford Bowl—he always wanted to go backstage to see the lighting control equipment.

As a young man he sang bass in the church choir, in the San Diego Bach Chorus, in choral workshops under Roger Wagner at San Diego State University, and in madrigal groups for "Dancing on the Green", an Elizabethan-era folk dancing event held in front of the Old Globe.

[3] Dugan's complex and atmospheric theatrical soundscapes led to a new title: during ACT's 1968–69 season, he was the first regional theatre person to be called a "sound designer".

[6] Dugan designed sound for three regional productions of Hair, the musical: ones in Chicago, Las Vegas and Toronto.

[7] Dugan was able to design sound but not allowed to operate the mixing console because he was not in the stagehands union: International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

[11][12] While designing sound for the musical Hair, Dugan began to appreciate the human operator's inability to act quickly enough to control multiple microphones.

The automixer with serial number 1, a unit Dugan fabricated by hand, "was installed in the conference room of Bell Labs by Harvey Fletcher".

"[2]Dugan licensed this more practical system to Altec who produced 4- and 8-channel automixers for commercial installations such as hotels, conference rooms, courtrooms and city council chambers.

[21] The gain limiting system provided smooth, continuous control over the equivalent number of open microphones (NOM) that the automixer would send at its outputs.

This card, the Dugan-MY16, could mix up to 16 channels of microphone inputs, assigned to selected inserts in the mixer's graphic user interface.

Like the Model E-1, the automixer could be adjusted through a web browser interface, allowing remote control with an iPad, touchscreen computer or laptop over wireless network.

[27] The Dugan algorithm moved inside Yamaha's QL-series of mixers in March 2014, as an option on the graphic equalizer processing page.

As he grew more interested in field recording, he was attracted to the sounds found in pristine natural settings—environments without human noise.

Dugan and his wife Sharon Perry, the Nature Sounds Society chair, recorded the dawn chorus of Cathedral Grove in Muir Woods once each month for a year.

[35] As co-founder and Secretary of PLANS, Dugan has given media interviews and was quoted in the book The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved.