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
We need a quorum of 15 members to certify the election.
You can vote by one of two ways:
- Attending the June Meeting and casting your vote. (Details below.)
- Voting by mail by downloading and printing the
election ballot
and mailing 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 the deadline, so that it can be counted when the meeting is held.
Full and Associate AES members of the PNW Section can vote in this election.
NOTE: The address for the ballots is a PO Box. Click on the ballot link to see the address.
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 must 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 also be made from the floor at the meeting, or (preferably) submitted in advance to the election committee chair. (email link below)
Online voting methodology:
The Elections Committee chair for the 2020 election is Dan Mortensen.
The June meeting will be held on Wednesday, June 17th, 2020, ???PM. It will be a virtual meeting, held via the Zoom online meeting application.
- The Election Committee will have a sufficient supply of random non-sequential three digit validation codes ready on the date of the June meeting.
- Upon Voter validation, preferably during the Doors Open/Pre-Meeting time, each voter will receive, via Private Chat, a unique code from an
Election Committee member other than Dan. That EC member will be the only person with codes correlated to voter names.
- The elections committee chair will have prepared before the meeting date, a ballot on the Doodle online choice-making platform containing the names of the Slate of Candidates
previously nominated by the Election Committee.
- When the meeting opens, or shortly after, the Election Committee Chair will open the floor to nominations for any position up for election.
Nominations can be either for oneself or someone else present at the meeting. Any nomination must be seconded to appear on the ballot.
- If there are seconded new nominations, the meeting will proceed while Dan toodles over to Doodle to revise the ballot to add the new candidates.
- When that revision is completed, they and/or the other EC member will announce that the election is open and sends the Doodle link to the identified Members.
- Voting will be open for at least an hour, with the remaining time announced at regular intervals until closing.
- Voters will enter their voting code, NOT their names, in the "Name" field in Doodle, and cast their ballots for Officer candidates, and for ONLY FIVE of the people running for Committee.
- The Doodle Poll will be set up so no voter can see any other voter’s choices.
- Although it is unavoidable that a voter COULD vote for every person running, or for more than FIVE Committee candidates, any voter who does so will have the excess votes for
Officers DISQUALIFIED(in case there is more than one candidate per office), and/or ALL their votes for Committee, since it will be impossible to tell their top five.
- Upon voting closure, the Election Committee Chair will privately read off the voter codes to the Election Committee member to validate votes, and will discard excess votes
as outlined above and/or those with invalid codes.
- The Officer candidates for each position with the most validated votes and the top 5 (validated) vote-getters for the Committee positions will win the election.
- At the end of the nomination period at the meeting, if there are no more than 4 candidate for the 4 Officer positions, and 5 candidates for the 5 Committee positions,
the Election Committee Chair will entertain a Motion and a Second to vote to accept the slate by voice acclaimation, which, upon vocal acceptance, will negate the need
for the voting described above. Mail-in ballots will be discarded unopened.
More Information
Our section's Mission Statement can be found at this
LINK.
More about Elections
BALLOT
Slate of Candidates and Biographical Information
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 / 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 — Lawrence Schwedler
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.
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.
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.
-
Bill Gibson
Bill Gibson is president of Northwest Music and Recording, Inc. and has spent the last 35 years writing, recording, producing, and teaching music.
As an audio professional and active sound engineer, Bill has developed unique insights into the techniques and procedures that produce extremely high quality audio,
both in the recording studio and in live performances. He is the author of more than 35 books and videos, and his writings are acclaimed for their straightforward
and understandable explanations of audio concepts and applications.
As an author, developmental editor, and communications and training specialist for Hal Leonard Corporation, Gibson has written and produced a wide range of
instructional content under his own name (The Hal Leonard Recording Method, The Ultimate Live Sound Operators Handbook, and many more) and alongside some of
the music industry's most iconic professionals including: Quincy Jones (Q on Producing), Bruce Swedien (The Bruce Swedien Recording Method), Dave Pensado
(The Pensado Papers), Sylvia Massy (Recording Unhinged), Alan Parsons (The Art and Science of Recording), Al Schmitt (Al Schmitt On the Record), Ed Cherney
(in production), and many more.
As a two-term National Trustee, a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Producers & Engineers Wing and the Planning & Governance Committee, and as a
Governor for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of The Recording Academy, Gibson advocates for the benefit of music producers, technicians, and
performers locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. He also authored
Recommendations for High-Resolution Music Production
for the Producers & Engineers Wing along with committee members Leslie Ann Jones, Chuck Ainlay, Bob Ludwig, Rick Plushner, and Phil Wagner.
-
Katie Gray
Katie Gray is an acoustician with Stantec, a top-tier global architecture
and engineering design firm. There her job is to make buildings sound
good. She does this through her impressive knowledge of acoustics,
supported by more than 20 years of musical training and experience in
the violin and viola.
Katie additionally has experience working in psychoacoustics research
at the Johns Hopkins University under Dr. Juan Huang and Dr. Xiaoqin
Wang, focusing on the relationship and influence of time on the
perception of consonance and dissonance.
She has worked on all types of projects in architectural acoustics,
including recording studios, theaters, schools, hospitals, and
commercial offices.
Katie Gray holds a M.A. in Acoustics from the Peabody Institute of the
Johns Hopkins University, and a B.M. in Violin Performance from
Towson University.
n.b. source: oct 2019 meeting notice
-
Steve Kirk
In addition to teaching guitar, bass, music theory and composition, Steve composes music for multi-media, and runs Steve Kirk Studios based out of Seattle, Washington.
Notable projects include:
- A score for Thimbleweed Park, created by game designer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion), a dark, point-and-click adventure in the retro style of the classic Lucas Arts adventure games. The Kickstarter campaign for this project was hugely successful, and nearly doubled the asking production budget. Released in Spring 2017 for XBox One, Speed and PC platforms. Steve's score is contemporary, haunting, and occasionally humorous. PC Gamer included
Steve's music in its article,
Listen to the best PC music of the year so far,
and Push Play awarded the score Top of the PS4 Pops in September of this year;
developer Terrible Toybox got an absolutely killer soundtrack from Steve Kirk...a cohesively eclectic delight...
-
Voodoo Vince Remastered
— After 13 years, one of Steve's first game projects, Voodoo Vince, gets a makeover. It includes over three hours of original music including a re-orchestrated
piece from the original and a new piece in the same vein. Released April 18, 2017 on Xbox One and Windows
platforms.
- Other projects include music for the iOS releases
Skurvy Skallywags
for Beep Games,
Cookie Jam
for SGN/Jam City, Cantina music for the Star Wars
MMOL game
The Old Republic,
music for the Disney game version of
The Princess and the Frog,
and the FarmVille Theme for Zynga.
-
Jim Rondinelli
Jim Rondinelli
Is Chief Operating Officer for Immersion Networks, Inc., a Redmond, WA based developer
of audio hardware and software. A 35 year veteran of the music and technology industries,
Mr. Rondinelli has been awarded several Gold and Platinum records for his work as a
Producer and Engineer with several groundbreaking artists including Matthew Sweet,
The Jayhawks, Wilco, Tragically Hip, Weezer and Everclear. He received Aria and
Juno awards for his work as Producer and Mixer before migrating to the technology
sector in 1999, originally as the SVP of Business Development for MP3.com.
Prior to his work at Immersion, Mr. Rondinelli was the Global Head of Digital for
Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, and led Licensing and Content Distribution for
several global music services.
-
Matt Stearns
Matt Stearns worked his way up to Staff Engineer at Binary Recording Studios in Bellingham WA
while attending Western Washington University, earning an admittedly unrelated BA in Psychology,
along with taking additional coursework in Audio Recording and Acoustics. Returning to Seattle
in 1992, during the “Grunge” phenomenon, finding paid studio positions was nearly impossible.
He spent a few years working in venue management while doing some location recording and live
sound reinforcement. During this time, he found his true passion, eventually logging over 25
years as an in-demand Front of House, Monitor, and Systems Engineer for all manner of live
performance. Matt has worked at prestigious venues including The Paramount Theatre, The Moore
Theatre, The 5th Avenue Theatre, Summer Nights at the Pier, Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery,
Marymoor Park, Key Arena, McCaw Hall, Benaroya Hall, and The Gorge Amphitheater.
He has worked with most local sound companies (primarily Carlson Audio Systems and Dansound)
and for bands and solo artists directly. From 2001 to 2017, he was the Principal Sound
Engineer at Meany Center, at the University of Washington, while continuing to freelance at
live music festivals such as Sasquatch, Bumbershoot, Zootunes, and Wintergrass, and enjoying
the occasional US tour.
In 2017, in a wild change of direction, he began a role as a Senior Audio Engineer at Stryker.
Mentoring under the venerable Bob Smith (many years active on the AES PNW board and committees),
Matt has taken on the responsibilities of the Acoustic Systems Department. His new challenges
include very in-depth acoustic research, audio engineering, and measurement
disciplines to improve new product development for medical device voice prompting and
voice recording systems. Matt is also tasked with finding ways to expand the department’s
reach within what is a truly global enterprise.
In 2020, having survived this long in his new role, he was just starting to find time to mix
live music again, when everything shut down due to COVID-19.
When the sun is out, Matt can be found outdoors, and as often as possible, on long
motorcycle journeys.
Last modified 05/21/2020 15:56:4.
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