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[AES Pacific NW Section - Seattle USA]

AES PNW Section

2021 Election of Officers and Committee

 

More Information

Our section's Mission Statement can be found at this LINK.

More about Elections

Slate of Candidates and Biographical Information

The nominations committee has proposed the following Slate of Candidates:

Officers

  • Chair — Greg Dixon

Greg Dixon teaches courses in Advanced Composition and Sound Design at DigiPen. He holds a Ph.D. in music composition with a specialization in computer music from the University of North Texas, where he worked as a composition teaching fellow, recording engineer, and technical assistant for The Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI). Greg received his M.M. in Music Composition and B.M. in Music Engineering Technology from Ball State University.

His compositional research focuses on electronic music and interactive music systems for games, acoustic instruments, sensor technologies, and human interface devices.

Greg has worked for more than fifteen years as a professional sound engineer, which has greatly influenced his strategies for designing sounds in the studio. In addition, he has served as a producer, recording engineer, arranger, performer, mixer, and mastering engineer on dozens of commercially available recordings in a wide variety of genres.

  • Vice Chair — Bob Smith

Bob has a BSEE from the University of Washington and has worked in the Biomedical industry for over 30 years. The last 20 years he has spent developing acoustic research and audio engineering disciplines for Styker/Physio-Control to improve speech intelligibility for medical device voice prompting and voice recording systems in noisy environments. He is responsible for voice prompting in 30+ languages. The department now handles acoustic measurements of components such as drivers, microphone capsules and system measurements including Thiele-Small parameters, polar plots, waterfalls, frequency response, impulse response, several speech intelligibility methods, etc.

When he's not playing acoustic/audio monkey for his corporate master, he runs an acoustic lab, SoundSmith Labs. From time to time, he can also be found recording local musical talents. Currently he is comparing several hardware and software acoustic / audio measurement systems to assess how much they vary and to the degree they converge on similar results.

  • Secretary — Gary Louie

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 — Lawrence Schwedler

Lawrence Schwedler is a musician with twenty years of experience in the video game industry as a composer, sound designer, and audio director. In 1993 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in classical guitar performance and electronic music from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a founding member of the Modern Arts Guitar Quartet, an avant-garde chamber ensemble which toured Europe, Mexico, Canada and the U.S.

From 1999 to 2012 he worked for Nintendo Software Technology as Audio Director, where he produced music and sound for fifteen game titles and received credit as co-author on two United States patents, one for interactive real time music composition and another for interactive wave table sound generation. In 2012 he left Nintendo to design and direct two new undergraduate degree programs in music and sound design at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond.

He lives in Sammamish, Washington with his wife, artist Randi Ganulin, accompanied from time to time by their son and daughter.

Section Committee (alphabetical order) There are 5 committee positions open, and 5 people vying to fill those positions. Our by-laws stipulate that new nominations can occur for any open position at the meeting called for the election: the June meeting. You can self-nominate, with a second needed, or nominate someone else who has agreed to run and serve if elected, also with a second needed.

Long time Committee member Steve Malott, recently retired from the Music Technology Department at Shoreline Community College. will become a Committee Member At-Large. In this appointed position, he'll be the executive producer of our meetings.

The top 5 vote getters are elected to fill the Committee positions. Persons serving must be AES members by the time of the summer planning meeting.

  • Jess Berg

Jess has been working as a live sound engineer for over 17 years, and has been recording sound since she got her first Tascam four-track cassette recorder in 1996. Born and raised in Minnesota, and being a lifelong musician, Jess decided to pursue her audio engineering and production education at The Institute of Production and Recording in 2002. She wanted to learn how to better record her own music and fell in love with working behind the scenes. She starting running sound in the local jazz clubs in 2003, and in 2004 was the assistant engineer for Skywynd's Escape Plan album. The next year, while still running sound in the jazz clubs, she also began working at Voiceworks, one of the top local voiceover studios, as their dub room engineer. In 2006, Jess became the Concert & Event Coordinator for the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, booking over 220 shows at five outdoor venues between June 1-Labor Day. During this time she was also a founding member of the JLR Foundation, a non-profit to help inner-city youth gain access to real-world recording technology in the parks. In 2009 she left the parks to work at The Institute of Production & Recording as the Academic Coordinator and co-instructor for their immersive SXSW course. Jess got her BS in Media Business at a sister school during this time, and continued to run sound at the Dakota Jazz Club. She was also a founding member of the Twin Cities Mobile Jazz Project, a non-profit aimed at providing under-privileged youth direct access to instruments and mentors from the greater MN music community.

In 2013, Jess moved to Los Angeles to pursue a touring career. She got her first gig a few months later, as the Front of House engineer and Tour Manager for a direct support act on a six-week North American club tour. The woman who hired her was an A-level tour manager and taught her everything she knew. This gig led to many more, and Jessica has since toured the world as a Front of House Engineer, Monitor Engineer, Tour Manager, and Production Manager, depending on the client's needs. During this time she also volunteered for a few years with SoundGirls, worked production at Coachella, and had local audio and production gigs in L.A. while in between tours with various production companies like Showpro, Rat Sound and Bigger Hammer. In 2017, Jessica decided to go back to school and pursue a Master of Arts in Music Industry Administration. She graduated in 2019 and moved to the Seattle area to base her tour life closer to nature, where she connected with the AES PNW Section and officially became an AES member. Jess began working as a house engineer with the local AEG venues (Showbox, Showbox SoDo) in between tours, and also picked up audio gigs with Eighth Day Sound in SoCal. In 2020, she signed on to work freelance A2 live audio gigs with Microsoft, and was a part of their shift to live event broadcasting from their production studios when covid hit. She continues to network and participate in music and audio discussions about the future of our industry while figuring out her next adventures. Jess and her rescue dog currently reside in Bellingham, WA.

  • Angela Dane

Dr. Angela Dane lives in Seattle, Washington, and teaches Women's Studies at the local community college. Her book, Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth was selected for the Gold Medal in Adult Nonfiction by Foreword Reviews in 2017. She is a Staff Writer and Editor for Tom Tom Magazine, the only publication in the world dedicated to female and non-binary percussionists. She owns and operates the only female and black-owned drum studio in Seattle dedicated to empowering women through the drum kit, Atrocity Drums. Additionally, she is the drummer for the all-female heavy rock band Atrocity Girl, whose members are recording and engineering their own debut album through a self-built home studio under the auspices of their LLC. She is currently enrolled in the University of Washington's Audio Production Certificate Program in order to learn the ropes of recording and started Seattle's Womxn & Audio Facebook Group to connect to and collaborate with others in the community.
Gear Fanatix, a site for underrepresented voices

  • Micah Hayes

Micah Hayes is the Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Director of Music Production at Seattle Pacific University, a position he began in the fall of 2020. He is a recording engineer and composer who began his musical career as a guitarist in his native Southern California. He began recording and composing music as a student at California State University, Chico where he completed a BA in Music with an emphasis in Recording Arts. After college, he continued his audio career with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida where he was the Recording Engineer Fellow from 2000-2002. After receiving a master's degree in music composition from the University of Oregon, Micah moved to New York where he worked as the live sound engineer for Redeemer Presbyterian Church's Upper West Side services, while also freelancing as a composer, recording engineer, and educator for a couple of years before accepting a teaching position at the University of Texas at Arlington. As a professor at UT Arlington, he helped create the Music Industry Studies area, overseeing the area's growth from 8 to 70 majors. In the summers, he engineered music at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2001 and at the Aspen Music Festival where he was a Senior Recording Engineer from 2003-05.

He began working as a film composer after being the sole recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Fellowship for Film Scoring and Composition at the Aspen Music Festival in 2006 where he studied with such composers as John Corigliano and Jeff Rona. As a film composer, he has scored multiple projects including Wolf, a film by Ya'Ke Smith that premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the short film Dawn, which aired on HBO several times.

  • James D. (JJ) Johnston

James D. (jj) Johnston is Chief Scientist of Immersion Networks. He has a long and distinguished career in electrical engineering, audio science, and digital signal processing. His research and product invention spans hearing and psychoacoustics, perceptual encoding, and spatial audio methodologies.

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. Most recently, he has been working in the area of auditory perception and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances.

Johnston worked for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research for two and a half decades. He later worked at Microsoft and then Neural Audio and its successors before joining Immersion. He is an IEEE Fellow, an 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. In 2006, he received the James L. Flanagan Signal Processing Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and presented the 2012 Heyser Lecture at the AES 133rd Convention: Audio, Radio, Acoustics and Signal Processing: the Way Forward. In 2021, along with two colleagues, Johnston was awarded the Industrial Innovation Award by the Signal Processing Society "for contributions to the standardization of audio coding technology."

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

  • Dr. Michael Matesky

Dr. Mike Matesky, a PNW AES member for over twenty years and current program committee member, has a Doctorate in Music from the University of Washington, has been a university professor of music, taught advanced audio engineering and been recorded on over one hundred commercial albums.

He was principal cello of numerous orchestras as well as the 5th Avenue Theater orchestra and has played with many touring artists. His father worked at nine motion picture studios in Los Angeles.

Dr. Mike has won national awards for audio and video productions. Opus 4 Studios, designed and owned by Dr. Mike, is a highly advanced audio/video recording studio with the world's most controllable acoustics featuring LARES. The studio features two grand pianos. Designed and built from the ground up by Dr. Mike, the Large Room (as measured by fellow AES member Bob Smith) is extraordinarily quiet and articulate.

Opus 4 Studios, has posted approximately 1200 viewable audio/videos on YouTube.com>opus4.

Dr. Mike is eternally grateful for the valuable assistance he has received and continues to receive from fellow AES members.

  • Dan Mortensen

Dan is President of Dansound Inc., which specializes in live sound reinforcement. He is currently serving on the Committee, and has previously held the posts of Chair, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer. After 30 years on the Committee, Dan continues to find that serving the AES PNW Section in one capacity or another is still one of his favorite things.

For nearly a year, he's been hosting a weekly Section Zoom meeting called "Tea Time Topics" in which a bunch of really smart people share presentations about something they are interested in (a wide range of topics!) and the 50th meeting is rapidly approaching. It's open to all, and info can be found at www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ttt

For almost 13 years he has enjoyed researching the history of CBS's 30th St. recording studio, home to the Section's late friend Frank Laico; much of that research can be found online at forums.stevehoffman.tv...

Last modified 05/13/2021 2130 hrs.