AES News

Dear Readers,

AES convention attendees have expressed a desire for more application-oriented papers. Our current Convention Papers and Posters are largely research-oriented, but we have a lot of engineers and practitioners who would appreciate presentations of a more practical nature. To this end we are instituting a new presentation initiative at the upcoming London AES Convention, called Engineering Briefs. These are intended to be short verbal talks or poster presentations that will be of interest to AES members. For this first time, only posters will be accepted, to facilitate planning for the Convention. Contributors must supply a short synopsis to indicate their desire to present an Engineering Brief, followed later by an electronic manuscript.

Update for New York: For the 131st Convention we will also accept short 15-minute paper presentations. The deadline is July 15th. 

Topics for the Engineering Briefs can be very wide-ranging, such as studio experience, equipment construction, new loudspeaker concepts, room acoustic measurements, analysis of audio equipment, and project studio startups, to name just a few. Relaxed reviewing of submissions will consider mainly whether they are of interest to AES convention attendees and are not overly commercial. Double-column electronic manuscripts will be restricted to 4 pages in length, and they will be available for all members on the AES website, but there will be no paper copies. For more information, please see the Call for Engineering Briefs.

John Vanderkooy
Journal Editor

The Nominations Committee is at this time soliciting the names of members to be considered for possible inclusion in the 2011 ballot for election of officers to the Board of Governors. To aid us in this task, please let us know if there is someone you would like us to consider for this election.

To be eligible for nomination, a candidate must be a voting member of the Society and belong to one of the following membership categories: honorary member, fellow, or member, and must be willing and able to attend the meeting of the Board of Governors each year.

Nominations must be received by March 7th, 2011 and can now be submitted online.

Submit a Candidate

A full year of preparation, augmented by hopeful rays of economic sunshine and a spirit-boosting World Series sweep by the SF Giants, provided 129th AES Convention exhibitors and attendees with an enthusiastic platform for previewing the industry’s latest hardware and software advances, re-establishing relationships and, updating business and technical expertise.

Over 14,000 attendees and more than 300 exhibitors crowded the Exhibition Hall, Workshops, Tech Tours, Panels, Platinum, Live Sound and Special Events.

“AES continues to represent the interests of the most serious, most influential and most advanced audience for professional audio gear and technology.” AES executive director Roger Furness says. “The growing appreciation for the quality of our technical programs, coupled with a palpable sense of community and an improving business climate continues to make the AES Convention a bellwether for positive developments in the world of professional audio."

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Our Board of Tellers recently announced the results of the AES election, and we can now welcome our new 2010-2011 officers:

President Elect:     Jan Abildgaard Pedersen

Secretary:     Robert E. Lee Jr.

Treasurer-Elect:     Garry Margolis

Vice President Eastern US and Canada:     Robert W. Breen

Vice President Western US and Canada:     Sean E. Olive

Vice President Northern Europe:     Ville Pulkki

Vice President Southern Europe:     No nominations were received for this position

Governors: Veronique Larcher, Peter G. Cook, and Bruce Craig Olson

These new officers join our current Board members James A. (Jim) Kaiser (President), Diemer de Vries (Past President), Frank Wells (VP), Bozena Kostek (VP), Joel Vieira De Brito (VP), Kimio Hamasaki (VP), David Josephson (Governor), David Murphy (Governor), Agnieszka Roginska (Governor), Jim Anderson (Governor), and Bob Moses (Governor).

As preparations for the 129th AES Convention enter the final weeks of a full year of planning, Convention Co-Chairs Valerie Tyler and Jim McTigue have announced that the Preliminary Calendar of Events is now live at http://www.aes.org/events/129/ The convention is set for Nov. 4-7 at SF’s Moscone Center. 

“The Preliminary Calendar is a user-friendly, full-color timetable of events, presenters, and drop-down abstracts describing papers, workshops and tutorials,” Tyler reports. “Fine-tuning will continue for some time to come, with program changes, including last-minute shifts in times, locations and participants,” Tyler adds. “However, the Preliminary Calendar will provide an excellent touchstone for attendees looking to develop their own preliminary schedules.”

“The 129th Convention Committee has developed a remarkable program,” said AES Executive Director Roger Furness. “Their tireless, entirely volunteer efforts cannot be over-emphasized. The countless hours they’ve devoted to planning Broadcast, Live Sound, Platinum, Historical, Master Class, Student and Special Events, Workshops, Papers, Tutorials and Technical Tours have produced a not-to-be-missed four-day event. 

“The AES objective of remaining indispensible to next-generation attendees is exemplified by the rapidly shifting issue of technology design.  To that end, we have dedicated a special track to the field of Product Design,” Furness adds. “Engineers, broadcasters, sound and music producers and students will find a concentrated program designed to provide in-depth awareness of this essential arena.”

“Our Exhibitors’ list includes many of our industry’s leading technology innovators,” concludes 129th Committee Co-Chair Jim McTigue. “AES Conventions remain the primary venue to see and discuss new gear, and, an irreplaceable forum for students, educators, technology designers, manufacturers and users, to exchange ideas. The 129th Convention looms as a strong candidate for a new standard of excellence in this mission.”

Our Board of Tellers recently announced the results of the AES election, and we can now welcome our new 2010-2011 officers who will take office on November 14, 2010:

President Elect:     Jan Abildgaard Pedersen

Secretary:     Robert E. Lee Jr.

Treasurer-Elect:     Garry Margolis

Vice President Eastern US and Canada:     Robert W. Breen

Vice President Western US and Canada:     Sean E. Olive

Vice President Northern Europe:     Ville Pulkki

Vice President Southern Europe:     No nominations were received for this position

Governors: Veronique Larcher, Peter G. Cook, and Bruce Craig Olson

Please welcome our new officers!

On August 24th at 6:30pm EDT the NY Section of the Audio Engineering Society will host a 40th Anniversary Salute to Electric Lady and the Hendrix legacy. The panel will include: Jimi’s sister, Janie Hendrix, CEO/President, Experience Hendrix; Eddie Kramer, engineer of all Hendrix’s recording sessions; studio architect/acoustician John Storyk who began his career with Electric Lady, and who’s international Walters-Storyk Design Group has created over 3,000 studios around the globe; long time Electric Lady engineer Tony Platt (AC/DC, Foreigner), and Grammy-winning engineer Bob Margouleff (Stevie Wonder) and Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitarist, longtime collaborator and longtime Electric Lady client.

CBS recorded the event and AES members can now watch the stream by clicking here.

Read more about this event

This new educational CD, produced by the AES Technical Committee on Signal Processing (TC_SP), is intended primarily to address issues relevant to digital signal processing algorithm designers and implementers.

Digital audio systems have obviously become ubiquitous in recent years, due in large part to the ingenuity and effort of Audio Engineering Society members. The maturity of the digital audio signal processing field can present a serious challenge for new students, researchers, software engineers, product testers, and other newcomers who must try to understand the relevance and relative importance of various signal processing parameters without being able to hear and see the details and effects: simply reading a written description is not the best way to learn and understand audio processing issues.

Since a typical characteristic of audio digital signal processing algorithms is the need for sustained, uninterrupted processing, even a single sample dropout or parameter update error can result in an audible artifact. Detecting, diagnosing, and correcting this sort of implementation error often requires experience listening for the defects, and examples of this type are included on this CD. The examples on this disc are intended to demonstrate a variety of the effects, both good and bad, that digital audio signal processing engineers are likely to come across in their work.

Purchase your copy today!

Initiated during an Audio Engineering Society Historical Committee meeting in 1997 by long-time member Irv Joel, the AES Oral History Project was envisioned as a personal record of the creative and technical thought process of the doyens of professional audio. "This AES Oral History Project was initiated as an inspiration to new generations of audio industry professionals," explains AES executive director Roger Furness. "Education remains an AES priority, and these unique DVD personal histories represent a priceless link between the past contributions of our worldwide membership and the on-going innovations of our rapidly evolving future.

"Irv Joel has had close, long-standing relationships with many of the giants of our industry," he continues. "In addition to co-ordinating the interviews, he served as cameraman and off-camera interviewer for the greater part of them, a massive undertaking. The entire professional audio community owes him a vote of thanks for producing over 100 irreplaceable one-on-one interviews."

In 2007, after 10 years of shooting with a basic lighting kit, two lavalier mics and... (continued at following link)

Read rest of story on Pro Sound News Europe website
 

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Rozenn Nicol has been investigating Spatial Audio technology at Orange Labs for more than ten years. With the publication of this monograph, she aims to promote a better understanding of how binaural technology really "works". Despite its straightforwardness the reproduction of binaural audio with headphones is always impressive - a really convincing 3D sound scene is achieved. This is possible because binaural technology merely mimics the spatial encoding that we use daily when we localize sounds in real life.

Starting from practical issues, concerning what is the real meaning of sound recording and rendering for binaural technology, the underlying theory is then progressively examined. The diffraction of the acoustic wave by the listener's body defines the key concept of binaural technology and can be represented by the associated transfer functions, which are known as Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTF). HRTFs are therefore the raw material of binaural spatialization. It is shown how the spatial information is conveyed through HRTFs, investigating both physical phenomena and auditory localization mechanisms.

Special attention is given to binaural synthesis which consists in simulating the left and right signals as they would have been recorded by a pair of microphones inserted in the listener's ear. This is one of the most well known applications of binaural technology, since it allows one, to create with full control a virtual auditory space for psychoacoustic experiment or virtual reality purposes. by straightforward filtering.

Although binaural technology is a powerful tool for sound spatialization, it should be kept in mind that, as the spatialization is determined by the listener's morphology which is unfortunately strongly individual, the spatial encoding of a sound scene is theoretically valid for one sole individual. The monograph ends with an overview of solutions for adapting the binaural spatialization process to an individual’s variability.

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