Audio Engineering Society - Melbourne Section -

February Meeting Notice

2020/02/082020/02/13Secretary

The next meeting of the AES Melbourne Section will be on Monday 24th February.

It will be a presentation and tour at

Collarts Wellington St Facilities

The Australian College of the Arts Pty Ltd. (Collarts) is a pre-eminent provider of industry-based tertiary learning for audio and media production and related industries to both Degree and diploma – level qualifications.

As well as the main facility at Wellington Street in Collingwood, Collarts also has a separate design campus in Cromwell St Collingwood, another common campus in George St Fitzroy, and a performance and production campus in Brunswick St Fitzroy.

Head of Audio Production, Jason Torrens will introduce us to the various course streams of the Audio Engineering degree covering desired outcomes, industry liaison and the support tools used, then provide a guided tour of the facilities and equipment used from live sound, recording studios and post production.

2020 Meeting Calendar

2019/12/152019/12/15Secretary

The Section Committee is working assiduously on the meeting calendar for the 2020 year.

The first meeting of 2020 is expected to be in February, and will probably be a facility tour, as usual.

Expect more news on this early in the new year.

December 2019 Meeting Report – Sound and Emotion

2019/12/152019/12/15Secretary

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.

Section Chair Graeme Huon introduces Neil McLachlan to the meeting

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.

Meeting Notice: December 2019

2019/11/232019/11/23Secretary

The next meeting of the AES Melbourne Section will be held on Monday December 9th 2019 at 7:30pm at
The SAE Institute – Lecture Theatre, 235 Normanby Rd South Melbourne (directions below).

Associate Professor Neil McLachlan of the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences will present on the topic:

Sound and Emotion

This talk will outline a new neuro-biological understanding of how hearing works. It will show how many auditory functions generally believed to involve complex neural processes in the human neo-cortex, are actually shared with primitive animals, and so involve ancient and relatively simple brain networks.