AES Section Meeting Reports

TAKTONS 2013 exhibition

Meeting Topic: AES Serbian Section and TAKTONS Audio Meeting Report

Moderator Name: Dejan Todorovic

Speaker Name: Diemer de Vries and Richard van Everdingen were invited speakers, reading papers on Room Acoustics, and Loudness in Distribution, and Michael Williams gave a tutorial on Multichannel and 3D Microphone Array Recording. Other papers were presented by speakers from the UK, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary and Serbia

Other business or activities at the meeting: The Serbian student section was very well represented with a dynamic student recording competition, which left nothing to be desired with respect to the main 'professional' recording competition.
The exhibition of professional audio was well attended with 18 exhibitors occupying a little over two floors of the radio station and representing practically all the well-known manufacturers of audio equipment throughout the world. It is indeed a measure of the success of this event that so much professional equipment was on show, and of course the interest shown by the large number of visitors not only from Serbia but also from many surrounding countries, reflected the wide horizon of technology that was being presented.
Mike and Sue Williams were invited to organise, in the exhibition area, sales of a wide selection of books titles from the AES European Bookstore, and as usual this stand also proved to be the meeting point for many students and professionals alike. The possibility to discuss all the details relating to individual membership, and also to obtain information concerning AES Sections and Section activities, was much appreciated.
On the evening of the third day a public gala concert was given in the well-known Studio 'M' of Radio Novi Sad. The concert started with four elderly ladies in colourful Slovak costumes singing and playing Diatonic single row accordions — the 'Meskarke' accordion ensemble. These ladies are self-taught musicians and have performed countless times in the past thirty years across Serbia and abroad, at festivals of street performers, and on television shows, in films and in theatres. The second ensemble to perform was the Aleksandar Dujin Orchestra playing compositions from his Vojvodjanske cycle, followed by Latin music songs and some jazz standards, and finishing this fairy-tale musical journey with some of the loveliest evergreen songs from former Yugoslavia.

Meeting Location: Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia

Summary

The AES Serbian Section and the Taktons Professional Recording Competition again grouped their energies into organising a combined professional audio event at the FTN Faculty of Technical Sciences (for the technical programme) and at the nearby Novi Sad Radio Station (for the recording competition and professional audio exhibition). This collaboration produced what we might well call a Serbian Audio Engineering Convention. The event was held in Novi Sad which is a beautiful historical city spanning the Danube, about 90 km north of Belgrade.
The opening conference was chaired by Arpad Osnovic (CEO of Taktons), and addressed by Jovan Bacic (Assistant General Manager for Technology & development at Radio Televizija Vojvodine), Rade Doroslovacki (Dean of Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad), Petar Pravica (Serbian AES President) and Michael Williams (from AES EuroServices).
The AES Serbian Section continued to increase the number of papers and tutorials that were presented at the FTN — 24 papers, 10 posters and 1 tutorial. The Paper Sessions that were held on the first day of the Technical Program included papers on Audio and Acoustics (Part 1 and Part 2 chaired by Prof. Petar Pravica), and Miking and Loudness (chaired by Prof. Dragan Drincic), together with a Poster Session (chaired by Dejan Todorovic). The second day was devoted to papers on Speech Technologies (chaired by Peter Nagy and Branislav Gerazov), followed by a round table discussion on Speech Technologies (chaired by Prof. Vlado Delic).
The Taktons recording competition, which of course is the heart of the 14th Taktons event, covered 14 categories of recordings (Jazz, Popular Music, Classical, etc., with or without an audience) with a jury made up of sound recording professionals mostly from the audio and audio visual industry throughout Serbia, but also from wider afield (Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina). Winners from this competition and previous Taktons recording competitions can be heard on the Taktons website at www.taktons.com.
Special thanks are due to Dejan Todorovic for his initiative in organising the collaboration between the AES Serbian Section Technical Program and the organisation of the Taktons Recording Competition and Exhibition. Many thanks to Prof. Vlado Delic and Faculty of Technical Science for support and organization of the Technical Program, and for the reviewing and editorial process of papers and the conference proceedings. Many thanks also due to Milica Petrovic for overseeing the complex administration of this event, and also for looking after the guest speakers so well.

Written By: Petar Pravica

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