AES Historical Committee Final Report
for the Board of Governors Meeting at the
117th Convention, San Francisco, 2004-11-01
The Historical Committee held an open meeting on Sunday, Oct 31,
from 09: to 11:00, with 9 persons in attendance. We discussed the
activities reported herein.
The presently active AES Historical Committee projects [as
numbered
in our Guidelines]
are as follows:
5 [Organize
and maintain an archive relating to the history of the Audio
Engineering
Society itself.]
- Project-leader
Roger Furness says that he will be able to devote time to organizing
and cataloging the history of the AES
itself.
- We have posted on our website the
available History
of the AES, updated from the history written by Don Plunkett.
8 [Encourage each Local Section and each Convention Committee to
organize
an appropriate session on the history of audio engineering,
or a display on an appropriate historical subject. When requested,
provide
information to help them to do so.]
- AES HC members under the leadership of Ernst Voelker
organized and
presented a very successful historical
exhibit for the 116th
Convention
in Berlin.
- The Historical Committee, Bill Wray, project leader, has
organized six
historical presentations for this (San Francisco) Convention,
including an off-site presentation of "Bay Area Electronic Music
Pioneers" organized by Gene Radzic, which had an overflow crowd.
- There are as yet no plans for a Historical Exhibit at
the 118th Convention in Barcelona, 2005-05. Roger Furness will inquire
of the Convention Committee to see if anyone is interested in
organizing an exhibit there.
9 [Create and operate two AES HC email
reflectors: a Steering Committee Reflector for discussions of
purely administrative
matters of the Committee; and a general Historical Reflector for
discussions
of actual historical matters.]
- Join our
reflector. The email reflector continues on the "recordist.com" server,
with
thanks to David Josephson.
10 [Create an AES HC web site on which to
publish
the information compiled in the following sections.]
11 [Create a directory of museums,
libraries, archives, and private collections that contain historic
audio
equipment or documents about the history of audio engineering.]
- The project leader, Myles
Cochran Davis, has reviewed and annotated the links on our website,
which may be seen
here. He will be contacting the
museums in order to establish better coordination with the AES HC.
12 [Devise
a catalog for classifying the inventions and developments made in audio
engineering, based on the work of HK Thiele.]
- Cornelius Bradter and Klaus
Hobohm of the TU-Berlin are continuing of the work of Manfred Krause
and the Historical Committee, with the new Thiele-Krause-Online-Archive
for the history of communication technology. It is a web-based archive
independent of physically existing documents. It is based on the
Thiele-Archive but is intended to go far beyond it. (The new online-archive
should not be confused with the Thiele-Archive, which is the actual
documents collected by H.K. Thiele.) The new Thiele-Krause-Online
Archive will be an online-platform for historic documents connectedwith
audio, video, acoustics, measurement and so on.
13 [Record oral histories (sound only, sound with video, and/or
sound with still photographs) of important figures in the history
of audio engineering.]
- The project continues with more new interviews. A complete
list of interviews completed, and their dates, and interviews
proposed, is now available.
We have now begun editing some of the interviews into a form that we
can make available. We are also transcribing a few of the
interviews. But our emphasis is still on recording new interviews.
- We continue to solicit your suggestions both for interviewers
and
for
further interviewees, especially for countries outside of the US.
14 [Collect, write, publish,
and otherwise disseminate accurate historical information about
the field
of audio engineering.]
- A new project for an Ampex
History, with Larry Miller as the project leader, has been started.
It will be based on Oral History interviews with 16 Ampex engineers and
managers. .
Jay McKnight, Chair
AES Historical Committee
Draft report written on 2004-10-15; updated 2004-11-15