The Audio Engineering Society - Producing success with knowledge.

In the audio engineering and music industry, few organizations hold the prestige and professional clout as the Audio Engineering Society (AES). Founded in 1948 and currently boasting over 14,000 members worldwide, AES is the standard society for professional Audio Engineers. AES holds conferences throughout the year and typically the attendance is a staggering 20,00 plus. In my particular field, AES offers many different educational and research tools I can use to further my career. On the AES website, there are 133 tutorials ranging in topic from recording techniques, equipment, and functionality to music business related topics and industry specific issues. AES caters to the students, who are about to enter the audio industry and need knowledge, guidance, and most importantly jobs. They have made sure to include a section of the website strictly devoted to students, and they offer students an extreme discounted membership to AES. In this section, new comers can find jobs, network, learn more, and get better at the art they practice. I am impressed that they offer all of these tutorials, most of the networking potential, and some job listings without being a member. This shows me how important the industry is to AES and how they have planned to keep it going through this digital transition we are all facing. There are also many forums to discuss current topics in that are categorized by what your particular focus might be. In this way students can converse with other students, while working engineers can contact other employed engineers and it works wonderfully. This is so important to myself because in order to perpetuate my career fully to the end, there must be a career to practice, right? AES’ tireless efforts to continue the traditions and knowledge passed on from generations of successful engineers and acousticians are a rare and great gift from AES to myself. Thank you AES! I will be renewing my student membership to escort me into the beginning of my long and prosperous career ahead. Please, tell me what you think about AES, and if you have a society that has changed your career for the better I want to know about it. Hope you have enjoyed the blog so far, improvements are soon approaching! See ya….

Julian Treasure on the 4 ways sound effects us

I was recently viewing speeches on TED.com came across a great one by Julian Treasure on the four ways sound effects us. For those of you who don’t know about TED, it is a website devoted to displaying speeches from a very diverse group of professionals about very interesting subjects. These subjects range from inspiring messages of life, to more exact explanations of scientific studies among many disciplines. Mr. Treasure has obviously studied sound and its effects on the human life. He had a very calm approach about the information he was giving to his audience. This mirrored the message behind his speech perfectly. He wanted to make his audience aware of how impactful sound was on not only their personal life, but also on their employees, brands, and businesses. Most sound around us is accidental and unpleasant and this makes our relationship with sound mostly unconscious. Julian played lots of audio clips as he was talking to help make his point apparent. You could hear the audience laughing and really understanding his message because they were actually experiencing the effects mentioned by Julian. There are four effects sound has on the human being, and knowing how to shape these sounds can dramatically change the outcome of situations. One effect is physiological, like when you hear an alarm or a buzzer. These sounds and the harmonics series and overtones that make them will actually produce cortizol, the “Fight or Flight” hormone. These sounds will also increase heart rate, breathing, and brainwaves. Knowing that approximately 12 cycles per minute resembles the breathing of a sleeping human further these sounds are very calming to us. Another effect of sound is psychological. Good and bad sounds have a profound effect on our mood and attitudes. The next effect is cognitive, like when two people are talking and your brain must choose which conversation to focus on. To the sound engineers in the audience, this is better known as the “Cocktail Party Effect” and it is due to the very limited bandwidth our auditory sensory system functions on. I found it very interesting that in an open plan office space, this phenomenon actually reduces productivity by 66%. Having a separated, quiet environment to work in will improve productivity by one third. The last effect was behavioral, and in my opinion the most noticeable effect. It was very interesting to hear Mr. Treasure say that most retail music is very inappropriate and in this way they reduce sales by 28%. He mentioned and I strongly agree that music is the most powerful sound in existence. The reason for this is music is easy to recognize, and it is easy to associate with. The summation of these will produce power. As a musician and a sound engineer this makes me feel an unimaginable sense of power of my fellow humans way of life. It also employees a greater sense of responsibility wielding said power. In a room filled with very intelligent and powerful businessmen and women, giving an informative speech is an almost impossible task, but Mr. Treasure’s calm domineer and solid statistics definitely impressed the audience. He left them with the four golden rules for commercial sound; make it congruent, make it appropriate, make it valuable, and finally to test it and re-test it again. Julian has devoted himself to the study of sound and its effects and he had spent some time with public speaking as well. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation for sound and I know I will be more aware of its effects on myself and those who I decide to market my wares to in the future. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did and more importantly I hope you learned something about the sound that surround you every day. Until next time . . .
Here is a link to the actual speech on TED.com
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html