Very nice turnout at the Holger Lauridsen event. Picture from the DR Museum Exhibition in DR-Byen.
This event was dedicated to Holger Lauridsen(1920-1957), one of the great Danish acousticians. Holger Lauridsen is not as well-known as many other Danish acousticians possibly because he only published in Danish and German.
Holger Lauridsen was a pioneer in several areas. Holger Lauridsen did ground-breaking work within cutting records, magnetic recording, FM-broadcasting and several other areas.
Mr. Lauridsen got his master's degree during the second world was war and along his studies he has was active in the Danish Resistance group BOPA. Mr. Lauridsen used his skills within recording techniques and broadcasting to transmit coded messages to the Danish resistance groups.
When Mr. Lauridsen finished his Master thesis in 1944 he was hired as the head of the sound lab at Danish government-owned radio public broadcasting company. Under his leadership the focus was on faithful reproduction of sound. Several psycho-acoustic experiments were done to find the best solutions. Probably the most important work was on the MS-recording technique, a mono-compatible stereo format. For more information on his work on the MS-technique see, The Reproduction of Sound in Auditory Perspective and a Compatible System of Stereophony in JAES Volume 40 Issue 10.
Mr. Lauridsen was part of developing a lot of equipment which was also used outside Denmark. Names like Lyrec TR-1, TR-2, AR-2 might ring a bell. The equipment was in many cases very robust and had a modular design which allowed quick repairs in the field. Standardisation was another topic on HL's mind and he was very active within the in European Broadcasting Union.
As an interesting side-note it could be mentioned that Mr. Lauridsen also helped give birth to electronic music in Denmark since it was in his lab Else Marie Pade, who was also a member of BOPA, learned how tone generators could generate the sound of "mermaids song".
At the event several examples of Mr. Lauridsen's work was were displayed, some examples can be seen here http://www.aes.org/sections/denmark/
During the break we had the chance to see part of the collection from DR-museum. This was very popular among several of the guests and several of them saw items from their own past.
AES Denmark would like to thank the presenters, DR-museum for the loan of the items on display and Teracom for sponsoring the event.
