Voting

For purposes of the quorum, it shall be the count of the voting members present at the meeting. If we do not have a quorum at the June meeting, then the election must be conducted at a later date by mail or via a virtual meeting.

• 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:

1. The Election Committee will have a sufficient supply of random non-sequential three digit validation codes ready on the date of the June meeting.
2. 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 the EC Chair. That EC member will be the only person with codes correlated to voter names.
3. The EC 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.
4. When the meeting opens, or shortly after, the EC 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.
5. If there are seconded new nominations, the meeting will proceed while the EC Chair toodles over to Doodle to revise the ballot to add the new candidates.
6. When that revision is completed, the EC Chair and/or the other EC member will announce that the election is open and sends the Doodle link to the identified Members.
7. Voting will be open for at least an hour, with the remaining time announced at regular intervals.
8. 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.
9. The Doodle Poll will be set up so no voter can see any other voter’s choices.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. At the end of the nomination period at the meeting, if there are no more than 4 candidates for the 4 Officer positions, and 5 candidates for the 5 Committee positions, the EC 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 as described above.

More Information

More about Elections  

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
  

  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 his career 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. He currently teaches Live Sound: Mixing and Recording at Berklee College of Music and previously taught Audio Production at The Art Institute of Seattle and Professional Entertainment Training at Green River College.

  As an author, developmental editor, and communications and training specialist for Hal Leonard Corporation, and now as Developmental Editor for Rowman & Littlefield, 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 and Al Schmitt on Vocal and Instrumental Recording Techniques), and many more. Bill's most recent instructional offerings include: Stream Great-Sounding Audio (eBook), Stream Great-Sounding Audio (audiobook), First 50 Recording Techniques You Should Know to Track Music (book Hal Leonard), The Ultimate Live Sound Operator's Handbook, 3rd Edition (book and eBook Rowman & Littlefield).

  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.

  A member of the Pacific Northwest AES Section since the mid '80s, Gibson has been proud to spend the last two years serving on the AES PNW Section's Program Committee.

• 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.

• 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 05/28/2020 17:53:33.