Dan Mortensen

Chair

Dan is President of Dansound Inc., which specializes in live sound reinforcement. He is currently Chair of the Section, and has previously held the posts of Committee member, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer. After 31 years on the Committee, Dan continues to find that serving the AES PNW Section in one capacity or another is still one of his favorite things.

For 3 years, he’s been hosting a weekly Section Zoom meeting called “Tea Time Topics” in which a bunch of really smart people share presentations about something they are interested in (a wide range of topics!) and the 140th meeting is rapidly approaching. It’s open to all, and info can be found at https://aes.org/sections/pnw/ttt/

For over 15 years he has enjoyed researching the history of CBS’s 30th St. recording studio, home to the Section’s late friend Frank Laico; much of that research can be found online at  forums.stevehoffman.tv. (search for “30th street” once you land) That research got him into the AES’ Historical Committee, where he was Historical Track Chair for over two Conventions, and is now in the initial stages of being in charge of the HC’s Oral History Project, where people who have made distinguished contributions to audio are interviewed about their lives and work. He has done 7 interviews so far, and by election time will have done 10 or more new interviews at the 2023 AES International Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation & Restoration at the Library of Congress facility in Culpeper, Virginia. Although the Oral Histories that Dan has done are not yet online because of reasons, AES members of any sort can view most of the other 120+ interviews in the series by Clicking HERE

If elected, this will be his 9th term as Chair in the last 29 years. It’s still interesting and fun.
Jess Berg

Vice-Chair

Jess is an audio engineer, tour manager, and musician, formerly based in the Pacific Northwest via Los Angeles, originally from Minneapolis, MN.

 

She’s been working in live sound and recording studios for over 19 years, and as Technical Supervisor with MPR/Minneapolis Public Radio since January 2022.


Jess has been an AES PNW Section Committee member since 2021. Learn more at:
www.jessbproductions.com

Gary Louie
Gary Louie

Secretary

Gary has been the recording engineer for the University of Washington School of Music since 1979, previously earning his BSEE at the UW. He has served as AES PNW Section Chair, Vice Chair, Committee, and most recently, Secretary since 1993. Gary is also the co-author, with Glenn White, of the Audio Dictionary 3rd Ed.

Lawrence Scwedler

Treasurer

Lawrence Schwedler is a musician with twenty years of experience in the video game industry as a composer, sound designer, and audio director. In 1993 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in classical guitar performance and electronic music from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a founding member of the Modern Arts Guitar Quartet, an avant-garde chamber ensemble which toured Europe, Mexico, Canada and the U.S.

 

From 1999 to 2012 he worked for Nintendo Software Technology as Audio Director, where he produced music and sound for fifteen game titles and received credit as co-author on two United States patents, one for interactive real time music composition and  another for interactive wave table sound generation. In 2012 he left Nintendo to design and direct two new undergraduate degree programs in music and sound design at the DigiPen Institute of
Technology in Redmond.


He lives in Sammamish, Washington with his wife, artist Randi Ganulin, accompanied from time to time by their son and daughter.  

Jayney Wallick

Committee Member

Jayney Wallick CPLP/CPTD, CTDP is an instructional designer who graduated from Thomas Edison State College with a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities, and an Associate of Arts in Liberal Arts/Music. She designs training materials like courses, facilitator and  participant guides, job aids, handouts, eLearning, etc. She has been recording live music since she was 17 years old (going on 3/4 of her lifetime!).

 

During apartheid, she spent 3 1/2 months in South Africa as part of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to create courses for trainers to deliver to Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU) members. During her visit, she met a local record label owner, and brought back vinyl albums from South African artists to donate to KEXP for airplay. Recently, she has been a Grammy U mentor and avid Tea Time Topics participant and presenter. She records a variety of local and touring artists so that she will leave behind a rich archive of live recorded music to the British Library National Sound Archive on her passing.

Luke Pacholski

Committee Member

Luke is 

Bob Smith

Committee Member

Bob has a BSEE from the University of Washington and has worked in the Biomedical industry for over 50 years.


The last 30 years he has spent developing acoustic research and audio engineering disciplines for Styker/Physio-Control to improve speech intelligibility for medical device voice prompting and voice recording systems in noisy environments. He was responsible for voice prompting in 30+ languages.


The department handles acoustic measurements of components such as drivers, microphone capsules and system measurements including Thiele-Small parameters, polar plots, waterfalls, frequency response, impulse response, several speech intelligibility methods, etc. Bob has now retired from corporate endeavors.

 

Bob runs an acoustic lab, SoundSmith Labs. From time to time, he can also be found recording local musical talents. Currently he is
exploring immersive audio in personal listening systems and  examining correlations between audio measurements and listener preferences.

Rod Evenson

Committee Member

Rod is 

Matthew Sutton

Committee Member

Matthew Sutton has worked in and around professional audio for almost 50 years. He was fortunate to learn audio engineering from Kearney Barton in the mid 70’s while also starting an audio repair business focused on professional audio & studio equipment.


Matthew designed and implemented the technical side of dozens of studios throughout the Pacific Northwest. He was the factory service rep for Ampex, MCI & Tascam and supported equipment from  virtually every manufacturer in almost every studio in the Seattle area, as well as Portland, Alaska and Hawaii.


In 1990, Matthew changed focus from audio to IT, then launched an Internet Service Provider in Downtown Seattle which he sold in 1999. He launched and built 3 software companies but kept his ears in the audio world by engineering approximately 200 live Seattle Opera broadcasts on KING FM. He also engineered, along with Rick Fisher, Seattle Opera’s live recording of Die Ring des Nibelungen which was released in 2014.


In 2022, Matthew “retired” from software, back to the audio world. He has launched Matthew Sutton – Technical Audio Services, LLC to
service equipment for studios, sound systems and high-end home audio users. Matthew also volunteers for 501 Commons, which places experienced executives in non-profit organizations to assist with strategic initiatives.

Michael Ashton

Committee Member

Michael is

Micah Hayes

Committee Member

Micah Hayes is the Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Director of Music Production at Seattle Pacific University, a position he began in the fall of 2020. He is a recording engineer and composer who began his musical career as a guitarist in his native Southern California. He began recording and composing music as a student at California State University, Chico where he completed a BA in Music with an emphasis in Recording Arts.

 

After college, he continued his audio career with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida where he was the Recording Engineer Fellow from 2000-2002. After receiving a master’s degree in music composition from the University of Oregon, Micah moved to New York where he worked as the live sound engineer for Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Upper West Side services, while also freelancing as a composer, recording engineer, and educator for a couple of years before accepting a teaching position at the University of Texas at Arlington. 


As a professor at UT Arlington, he helped create the Music Industry Studies area, overseeing the area’s growth from 8 to 70 majors. In the summers, he engineered music at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2001 and at the Aspen Music Festival where he was a Senior Recording Engineer from 2003-05.


He began working as a film composer after being the sole recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Fellowship for Film Scoring and Composition at the Aspen Music Festival in 2006 where he studied with such composers as John Corigliano and Jeff Rona. As a film
composer, he has scored multiple projects including Wolf, a film by Ya’Ke Smith that premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the short film Dawn, which aired on HBO several times.

Jim Rondinelli

Committee Member

Jim is 

Erin Shellman

Committee Member

Erin Shellman, –  Biologist, data scientist, and musician
I’m a biologist, data scientist, and a lifelong musician. I’ve been working in the data science industry in Seattle for over a decade and am exploring how to transition my career to record and produce audio for a living.

 

Most of my experience with audio comes through music performance and recording, and I’ve always been interested in the technical aspects of making music. I always jump in where I’m needed, occasionally running sound for small acts, producing demos and EPs for my friends in grad school, and recording my own LP with a seasoned engineer and producer.


At home, I record audio and video of my arrangements and through those projects have gained experience with different DAWs and video editing tools. Besides my musical background, I’ve also got a lot of experience in community building and activism from my time
as an organizer for the Seattle chapter of PyLadies, an international organization for women who program in Python. During my time as an organizer, we grew the group from just a handful of members to hundreds of members by improving branding and offering many events every month including weekly hacknights, monthly seminars, and career networking events. I’m excited for this opportunity to learn, meet like-minded people, and contribute to the audio engineering community!

James D. (jj) Johnston

Committee Member

James D. (jj) Johnston is Chief Scientist of Immersion Networks. He has a long and distinguished career in electrical engineering, audio science, and digital signal processing. His research and product invention spans hearing and psychoacoustics, perceptual encoding, and spatial audio methodologies.
 
He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC. Most recently, he has been working in the area of auditory perception and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances.
 
Johnston worked for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research for two and a half decades. He later worked at Microsoft and then Neural Audio and its successors before joining Immersion. He is an IEEE Fellow, an AES Fellow, a NJ Inventor of the Year, an AT&T Technical Medalist and Standards Awardee, and a co-recipient of the IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award. In 2006, he received the James L. Flanagan Signal Processing Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and presented the 2012 Heyser Lecture at the AES 133rd Convention: Audio, Radio, Acoustics and Signal Processing: the Way Forward. 
 
In 2021, along with two colleagues, Johnston was awarded the Industrial Innovation Award by the Signal Processing Society “for contributions to the standardization of audio coding technology.”
 
jj received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976 respectively.