AES Student Blog

Meet Mark Drews, one of our honorable judges for Category 4: Sound for Visual Media.

Mark Drews is director of music production and recording studies at the University of Stavanger, on Norway’s southwest coast. He began his professional recording career in 1983 recording classical music and jazz for the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. From 1984 thru 1995, he was senior audio engineer/lecturer at the Syracuse University School of Music and was an active independent recording engineer and musician in Central New York. He is author of New Ears: The Audio Career & Education Handbook.

Drews has recorded thousands of concerts and other music performances in the United States and Norway for radio and commercial release. He also has designed and installed a variety of audio facilities for music recording and sound for picture.

In addition, he’s had a senior Fulbright research fellowship to Norway, an audio research residency at the Banff Centre’s music and sound department in Canada and an international visiting scholar position at the University of Michigan’s School of Music.

Drews has been involved with AES student activities for years having been on the first panel of judges at the Amsterdam convention in 1998 and several others since then.  

An advocate for the support and advancement of audio education, Mark is an active member of the Audio Engineering Society, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services. He also is a board member of the Norwegian Institute for Recorded Sound.

In his spare time, he is busy with family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic, he is musically active as bassist in the Stavanger Big Band. Just by coincidence, his wife’s name is Tone.