7:30 MARCH 31, 2005 JOINT AES/ACM SIGGRAPH MEETING

 

Introduction:

Please join us this month for a joint meeting hosted by AES (Audio Engineering Society) Pacific Northwest Section and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGGRAPH Seattle Chapter at DigiPen Institute of Technology.

 

Ken Greenebaum will lead a panel discussing their articles in the book, Audio Anecdotes, (reviewed this month in the March AES Journal).

 

Audio Anecdotes, published by A K Peters, is an ongoing project to share the tools, tips, techniques, and experience gleaned from from the working in the trenches by experts across the wide fields of sound. (topics areas include: the physics of sound generation and propagation, synthesis, analysis, recording, reproduction, music theory, and the effect of sound on the mind and body)

 

Audio Anecdotes Volume I, and Volume II are now available; Volume III is well underway.

 

Books are known to be locally stocked at the Redmond Borders, and by the University Bookstore (locations) and are available online from all the usual suspects including Amazon.com and the publisher. We are hoping to have a limited supply of discounted books available at the meeting for purchase and signing.

 

Meeting:

The panel will consist of local contributors to Audio Anecdotes with a variety of experiences.  We will introduce the project, panelists will relate their audio experiences, and we will solicit comments and participation from the audience. Audio Anecdotes is a project in your backyard, we encourage your involvement, perhaps by contributing your own Anecdote or by contributing another way.

 

It will be exciting to bring professionals and students from the fields of Audio and Computer Graphics together at this joint AES / ACM SIGGRAPH meeting. If you are looking for an opportunity to network, this is a meeting not to miss.

 

DigiPen has graciously provided refreshments to facilitate networking. Door prizes have been contributed by DigiPen and and by A K Peters.

 

Time:

The meeting will begin at 7:30PM, Thursday March 31st in DigiPen's Plato Auditorium (please follow the signs upstairs)

 

Directions:

DIGIPEN Institute of Technology, 5001 150th Ave NE, Redmond 98052

Directions – (Conveniently located off of 520 in Redmond)

 

Panel:

Ken Greenebaum will discuss the overall project including motivation for the books from his experiences at Silicon Graphics, and Microsoft. Ken will share his challenges and experiences 'plumbing' low-latency, synchronized, digital media streams, in general purpose computers.

 

Derek DiFilippo will discuss his two contributions, Perceivable Auditory Latencies, and Introduction to the theory of Signal Detection: Measuring Human
Response. Derek explores the forgotten, classic research on latency, as well as the lessons he learned the hard way engineering studies of human subjects.

 

Dex Manley, based on his experience as a professional voice talent will discuss topics, ranging from microphone technique, and script preparation, to preparing the talent, from his article, How to Make Great Voice Recordings.

 

David Thiel created dynamically synthesized interactive sound for arcade games on the 1980's including the wildly popular Q*Bert. Twenty years later we have dramatically more resources to devote to sound, but we use less, not more, synthesis preferring to lean heavily on non-interactive, pre-recorded, samples. David will discuss the implications of his article Retro Game Sound: What we can learn from 1980s Era Synthesis.

 

Many more contributors (to both the existing and future volumes) will be in the audience. Howard Good (Kubota/Microsoft) will demo the CD accompanying the books which include interactive programs that implement the concepts from the articles, as well as the cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) source code and build environment created for the book.
 

 

Bios:

Ken Greenebaum is a software engineer and has been developing audio and video digital media applications over the past 15 years for companies that include Silicon Graphics and most recently, Microsoft. Ken’s research interests include the creation of reliable, sample-accurate, low-latency media engines; language systems to describe time-varying behavior of sound; video and graphics to form high-quality, low-bitrate animation; and temporal optimization based on human perception of just noticeable differences.
 

Derek DiFilippo conducted research on haptic interfaces while completing his M.S.C. in computer science at the University of British Columbia and recently has been developing video compression applications at a Seattle area start-up. When he is not in a technical pursuit, he can be found playing with the Seattle Guitar Circle.

 

Dex Manley is a nationally recognized, award-winning voice talent and commercial actor. With over 300 radio commercials to his credit, Dex is also featured in more than 25 video games, and has provided media talent services to many companies, including Microsoft, Boeing, and Alaska Airlines. In addition to his career as a voice talent and actor, Dex is the president of Tenacious Media, a full service media production and marketing company operating in the Seattle, Washington area.
 

David Thiel has toured the US in rock and lounge bands, trained employees to program PL/I for an insurance company, created sounds and music and spec’ed sound systems for coin-operated video and pinball games, console games, and PC games. More recently, David worked on creative interactive audio solutions for advanced user interfaces at Microsoft Research. David’s company Audio4Interaction (www.aud4int.com) is a consulting firm that specializes in creating audio for human computer interaction.