Category: Past Events and Meetings

About twenty members and guests assembled in the auditorium of the Collarts Wellington St Collingwood campus for a presentation on their audio education activities and a tour of their audio facilities.

Chairman Graeme Huon welcomed all to the meeting and introduced Collarts Head of Audio Production, Jason Torrens, who was to give the presentation and host the tour.
Jason was informally supported in the presentation by Dr Paul Doornbush (Associate Dean) and Dylan Mitrovich (Coordinator of Audio Production).

Graeme Huon introduced our speaker Neil McLachlan, Associate Professor of the Melbourne University School of Psychological Sciences who was to present to us on Sound and Emotion.

Graeme outlined Neil’s wide range of experience as a researcher in the Departments of Engineering, Architecture, Psychology and Music, as well as working professionally as a performer, instrument designer, and acoustic consultant.

Neil started by introducing the idea of an “auditory brain”, and understanding sound from a psychological perspective. He gave us a quick summary of his work on the Federation Bells project, explaining how one dimensional vibration systems (i.e. voices and most instruments) naturally produce harmonic series, but bells, gongs, and other percussions instruments vibrate in two or three dimensions, so they don’t produce harmonic series. Up to that point nobody had been able to produce bells with harmonic series. He then briefly described how he arrived at the bell shapes necessary to produce bells with perfect pitch.
He went on to describe his experiences with the Gamelan Indonesian percussion orchestras and their use of dissonance as a musical element.

Exploring the Pro Tools Workflow Enhancements

Chairman Graeme Huon welcomed attendees and introduced our speaker Drew Parson, Audio Applications Specialist at AVID Australian & New Zealand. Graeme also introduced Leigh Spachic, General Manager of Innovative Music Australia, and thanked him for facilitating this presentation.

Drew reviewed a variety of new and sometimes overlooked Pro Tools features developed over the last four years to date with a focus on TV, post-production and music production workflows. In line with its policy of continuous Pro Tools updates, AVID developed many of these enhancements in direct response to customer feedback and evolving technical standards, practices and partner ecosystems.

Following the Section’s Annual General Meeting (see AGM Report at: http://www.aesmelbourne.org.au/2019-agm-report/ ), Graeme Huon introduced our speaker Guillaume Potard who presented to us on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence and its relevance to the world of audio.

Guillaume started with a brief introduction to the concepts of ML and AI, introducing the concepts of artificial narrow intelligence (where it is designed for a very narrow speciality, like playing a specific game of skill, like Go), and artificial general intelligence, as in the human brain.
He went on to contrast the estimated performance of the human brain, at approx. 1000 petaflops (one thousand million floating point operations) operating at 200Hz with a power consumption of just 20 watts with the most powerful current supercomputers ( eg Tahne-2) at only 32 petaflops at GHZz ranges and with a power consumption of 25 Megawatts.