Chair Aurika Hays opened the meeting with some remarks about the success of the preceeding year, with 8 meetings, and thanks to the members for all the hard work. A count of AES members was made to ensure a quorum for elections, with 16 members counted and 28 total attendees. Everyone briefly introduced themselves, then members signed in for ballots and voted. The meeting continued as votes were tallied.

Ron Hyder and Rick Chinn (both Section committeemen) gave details of continuing improvements to the sound reinforcement system in the Benaroya Hall S. Mark Taper Auditorium upstairs. Never intended to have a true reinforcement system installed, a JBL Vertec line array system has recently been purchased for left/right arrays. The built-in central cluster system, normally intended for basic use such as announcements, was redone with JBL components to match the Vertec sound. A distributed speaker array was installed under the balcony, and a Soundcraft Series 4 board was bought. Unfortunately, the Seattle Symphony was in closed rehearsal at this time, so we could not see the items firsthand, but we could view the rehearsal on the Soundbridge plasma TV.

Bryan Stratton, Manager of Soundbridge, then spoke. Soundbridge strives to be a hub for the Seattle Symphony's education and community programs. It not only has high-tech, hands-on interactive exhibits such as "be a virtual conductor", real instruments you can try, a "Music Bar" with hundreds of musical pieces you can call up and listen to, but it also has programs and classes to educate people of all ages about music.

The space was originally supposed to be a small restaurant. Bryan walked the group through the exhibits, which included:

• A "Music Bar", with a row of PCs connected to a server. Each station has touchscreen controls to find information about hundreds of musical pieces, composers, styles, and the Seattle Symphony recordings.
• a video kiosk that explains forms and styles of music, such as the sonata.
• a video kiosk that shows music use in films and cartoons.
• a high-definition TV kiosk with interviews of musicians talking about their careers.
• a display of the same pieces played by 5 different conductors. Interestingly, Bryan finds that pieces written before recording (such as Beethoven) seem to have more variation than pieces written after the widespread use of recording (such as Stravinsky).
• Meet the Conductor kiosk, with a video of symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz, and a video display of the orchestra from a conductor's eye view, where you may pretend to be the conductor.
• Several kiosks introducing the instruments and musicians. For example, a video interviews the cello player and shows the instrument's construction, you can hear examples, and there is a real, fastened-down cello to try out. There were also displays for brass, percussion, woodwinds and even pipe organ and piano.
• The Science of Sound exhibit has many sound making gadgets and an oscilloscope to show the waveforms.

The results for 2002-03 officers were:

• Rick Chinn, Chair
• Dave Tosti-Lane, Vice-Chair
• Gary Louie, Secretary
• Dan Mortensen, Treasurer
• Dave Franzwa, Committee (2 year term)
• Aurika Hays, Committee (2 year term)
• Ron Hyder, Committee (2 year term)
• Lindsay Smith, Committee (2 year term)

Members then discussed meeting ideas for next season. Film scoring, IMAX theaters, acoustic analyzers, grounding and shielding, were discussed and will be considered. The meeting was then adjourned.