At our June meeting, we will hold our annual elections for the officers and committee positions that form the backbone of our AES section. The committee is in charge of actively planning all logistics for our meetings and activities.

Voting

• Attending the June Meeting and casting your vote in person.
• Vote by mail by downloading and printing the election ballot  (right-click the link) and mail it to the address shown on the Ballot. Be sure to put your membership number on the front of the envelope (in the return address or in the lower left corner). This needs to be RECEIVED by June 17, 2014, so that it can be counted on June 18.

For purposes of the quorum, it shall be the sum of the voting members present at the meeting and those members who voted by mail. If we do not have a quorum at the June meeting, then the election shall be conducted by mail.

• Officers hold their positions for one year.
• Committee positions are for two years. There are 10 positions, 5 of them elect every year to ensure continuity in the committee.
• Members and Associate members of the PNW Section may vote.
• Nominations can be made from the floor at the meeting, or (preferably) submitted to nominations chair.

More about Elections    BALLOT 

Slate of Candidates

• Chair — Steve Malott / Shoreline College
• Vice Chair — Dave Tosti-Lane / Cornish College
• Secretary — Gary Louie / University of Washington, School of Music
• Treasurer — Greg Mauser

Section Committee

• Mark Rogers / Greenbusch Group
• Lawrence Schwedler / DigiPen Institute of Technology
• JJ Johnston / Retired
• Ivan Tashev / Microsoft
• Rich Williams / Lunchbox Audio

Candidate Bio Information

Officers

Steve Malott has participated in AES meetings for many years but has only seriously put his money where his mouth is for a few years (by joining AES). As a broadcaster (and former SBE student member), audio engineer, producer and educator, Steve is continually surprised by the talent unearthed and the diverse opportunities available to anyone who has more than a passing interest in audio. After serving his second term as Governor for the Recording Academy and participating in Producer's and Engineer's Wing, Grammy U and membership activities, Steve's goal is to negotiate a closer alliance between the two organizations, with an eye towards more cooperative cross-participation for both groups. Among the topics Steve is interested in pursuing for PNW AES:

• The economics of audio equipment (who decides to make what, and how much money do they make doing it)
• Math for struggling audio engineers (and why it's good to understand it)
• Sharpening listening skills: a primer for audio professionals
• Why is it sometimes $150 mics seem to sound as good and work better than $5,000 mics?
• Why don't most audio engineers win national awards or substantial industry recognition?

Steve says, "I'm always interested in great hardware or software demos, along the lines of:

• Mic Shootout
• A-D / D-A Shootout
• Loudspeaker Shootout
• Codec Shootout

and the ever-popular — DAW Shootout.

Even if not elected I am still interested in moving NARAS and AES closer together in membership and participant activities."

Vice-Chair — Dave Tosti-Lane / Cornish College

Dave will be retiring from his position as Chair of the Performance Production Department at Cornish College of the Arts this December, after which he imagines a life of leisure cavorting with unicorns and other mythical creatures (imagination, as you can see, doesn't always serve him well, but he'll theoretically have more time to be the Vice Chair anyway). He has been a professor, sound designer, technical director, lighting designer and technical consultant, and is one of the founders of the department he leads at Cornish. He is active in professional organizations such as the U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT), where he is Commissioner of the Sound Commission and the Associate Editor for Sound for TD&T, the Journal of the USITT; The International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (OISTAT), where he is a member of the Sound Design Working Group; and the Audio Engineering Society (AES), where he has served on standards committees, and has been a committee member, Vice Chair and Chair of the Pacific Northwest Section of the AES.

Dave holds a BS in Management and an MFA in Technical Theater/Lighting Design from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, however his adventures in sound probably started with the 3" reel to reel message recorder he was given sometime around 1962 (and immediately took apart to see how it worked - or used to work at that point).

Secretary — Gary Louie / University of Washington, School of Music

Gary has been the recording engineer for the University of Washington School of Music since 1979, previously earning his BSEE at the UW. He has served as AES PNW Section Chair, Vice Chair, Committee, and most recently, Secretary since 1993. Gary is also the co-author, with Glenn White, of the Audio Dictionary 3rd Ed.

Treasurer — Greg Mauser

Greg has a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering from Bradley University. He has as an extensive background in Hardware and Software product development for industrial and aerospace markets. He currently works as a Test Engineer at Astronics Corporation in Redmond.

Greg has been building amps, pedals, and synthesizers since he started playing guitar at age 14. He is an avid home recording enthusiast and has produced several CDs of his own music. He has played in many PNW bands since moving here from Chicago 20 years ago and is currently working on his own business startup designing and manufacturing guitar pedals. He has served for the past several years as committee member and Vice Chair of the AES PNW Section.

Section Committee (alpha order)

Mark is Director of the AV Department at the Greenbusch Group, a Seattle acoustical consulting firm. He is a designer of audio/visual systems, including sound reinforcement, audio reproduction, video projection and displays, videoconferencing and audioconferencing, and related control systems. Typical projects include corporate boardrooms, convention centers, universities and hospitals. He has designed and installed AV for over 30 years, and also teaches classes and seminars on AV technology. He is a registered Professional Engineer (Idaho) and earned his BSEE at the University of Idaho. He is a past Vice Chair and Committee member of the PNW AES Section and has presented several topics to the section.

Lawrence Schwedler / Digipen Institute of Technology

Lawrence Schwedler has worked in the video game industry as a composer, sound designer and audio director for twenty years. In 1993 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in classical guitar and electronic music from UCLA, where he was a founding member of the Modern Arts Guitar Quartet. From 1999 to 2012 he served as audio director for Nintendo Software Technology, where he co-authored two U.S. patents for adaptive music and audio. In August 2012, he left Nintendo to direct the new undergraduate programs in music and sound design at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond.

JJ Johnston / Retired

JJ received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976 respectively.

JJ temporarily retired in 2002 but worked 26 years for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research. He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC, as well as the AT&T Bell Labs or AT&T Labs-Research PXFM (perceptual transform coding) and PAC (perceptual audio coding) and the ASPEC algorithm that provided the best audio quality in the MPEG-1 audio tests.

Most recently he has been working in the area of auditory perception of soundfields, electronic soundfield correction, ways to capture soundfield cues and represent them, and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances. He was most recently employed by DTS Audio and his current status is retired.

Mr. Johnston is an IEEE Fellow, and AES Fellow, a NJ Inventor of the Year, an AT&T Technical Medalist and Standards Awardee, and a co-recipient of the IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award. Mr. Johnston has presented many times for the PNW Section, most recently on the issues surrounding "Dynamic Range." In 2006, he received the James L. Flanagan Signal Processing Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and presented the Heyser Lecture at the AES 133rd Convention in 2012 [Audio, Radio, Acoustics and Signal Processing: the Way Forward].

Ivan Tashev / Microsoft

Dr. Tashev works on creation of novel sound capturing and sound rendering devices and audio processing algorithms at Microsoft Research. He created and implemented the algorithm for the microphone array support in Windows Vista. He has published more than 60 scientific papers and has 34 submissions for US patents. Four of them have already been granted and all are in the area of novel audio processing algorithms. He holds the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (1990) and the Masters Degree in Electronics (1984), both from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Dr. Tashev's book, Sound Capture and Processing: Practical Approaches was published in 2009.

Rich Williams / Lunchbox Audio

Rich is the owner of Lunchbox Audio, a local and online audio retailer for recording & live sound equipment, software, and accessories. Previously he ran a humble project studio producing demos for bands in the Midwest but the lure of getting a rain-tan caused him to relocate to the Pacific Northwest. Rich is also a member of the Recording Academy, BMI, and NAMM.

Recent praise for Lunchbox Audio include 2013 & 2014 NAMM Top 100 Dealer, 2013 Moog Up & Coming Dealer, and Focal Professional's 2013 Dedication Award.