John Vanderkooy - Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo — Toronto AES Section -- November 26, 2019
The Toronto AES held its annual convention review which, as always, is an great opportunity to get an overview of some of the papers and various workshops presented, for those who couldn't attend the conventions,
The event began with Alan introducing John Vanderkooy. This was indeed a special night - John has been reviewing papers for these meetings for 25 years. He noted he was trying to be as provocative as possible with these papers!
Some of the topics he looked at included: Green Speaker Design, In-Vehicle Road Noise Cancellation on Music Playback, Modifying Audio Signal for Reproduction with Reduced Room Effect, and Spherical Microphone Array Shape to Improve Beamforming Performance, to name a few.
After a socializing break, Denis Tremblay began his presentation. His specialty was Immersive Sound, so quite a few of the papers he reviewed reflected that.
Some of the topics included Spatial Auditory Masking for 3-Dimensional Audio Coding (noting the "rules of masking change when working in 3D sound"); Investigation of Masking Thresholds for Spatially Distributed Sound Sources ("precedent effect in the vertical plane"); "A Novel Impulse Response Capture Technique for Realistic Artificial Reverberation in the 22.2 Multichannel Audio Format" (adding he was happy to research in the area for reverb in immersive sound).
He thought this paper utilized the most unique signal generator: convention paper #10291 — Measurement of oral-binaural room impulse response by Singing Scales.
And finally, a topic "near and dear to my heart" (convention paper #10315) "Comparison of Human and Machine Recognition of Electric Guitar types". An audience member questioned "Does this mean we'll need only one guitar?" to which Denis responded: "Don't tell my wife!"
Jeff Bamford closed the evening's presentations looking primarily at tutorials and workshops with topics including the maturing IP industry, Inclusivity, Loudness Wars ("finally dead"), the networking protocol Milan based on AES 67, and Podcasts.
In his closing remarks, Jeff thanked John Vanderkooy for doing these reviews for all these years: this will have been John's last participation reviewing convention papers.
Jeff and Alan noted that decisions were still being made for the next meeting topic.
