Audio Forum 2018

November 16, 2018 | 17:00 – 18:00 | on-site

Larry is an old friend and acquaintance of the Audio Forum team. Since 1998, he has organized The School of Sound symposium – a biennial four-day event that explores the creativity of sound in art and media, with a special emphasis on sound for image. He produces each edition of the event with his wife, Diane Freeman Sider, a former television producer.

He is an active member of the British sound in media community. Moreover, while waiting for the next School of Sound, plethora of Larry’s events happen in the meantime!

He is former Head of Post-production at National Film and Television School (NFTS), a highly esteemed European school that is no stranger to Serbian students.

At Audio Forum 2018, Larry delivered the keynote speech and set the general tone of the event. We are very grateful for all his support, especially for listing Audio Forum in The School of Sound newsletter in 2018, alongside similar events in the UK.

November 16 and 17, 2018 | 18:30 – 19:30 and 13:30 – 14:30 | on-site

Audio Forum has a very good relationship with Steinberg. However, it was only in 2018 that we managed to add them to the main program of the Audio Forum. On that occasion, we enjoyed the presentations of a great guy from Venezuela.

Aldo Lamana is a Product Specialist, MI & Professional Audio at Steinberg Media Technologies – the guy who is spreading the good word of Steinberg around the world. At Audio Forum 2018, he gave two lectures: on Nuendo’s ADR solutions and the integration of Nuendo with WWISE (software for game sound implementation).

Working at Steinberg is a logical continuation of Aldo’s previous career. Before coming from Venezuela to Germany in 2012, he worked with sound live and in the studio, and after moving – as a musician, studio assistant and mastering engineer. He has been working for Steinberg since 2014, where he grew into a role of the Product Specialist in sales and export procedures.

Aldo is a great friend of Audio Forum, so be sure that we will see him often!

Aldo gave two lectures at Audio Forum 2018:

• About using specialized tools for ADR in Steinberg Nuendo
• About using specialized video game pipeline tools and WWISE middleware connection, using Steinberg Nuendo

November 16, 2018 | 20:00 – 21:30 | online

Since 2018, Audio Forum can finally boast of having hosted a lecture by an Oscar winner – Mark Mangini. He won the Oscar in 2015 in the Best Sound Editing for his work on „Mad Max: Fury Road“, along with David White.

How to win an Oscar? Here’s how: Mark has over 125 films behind him, he designed the sound for Leo the Lion from the MGM credits, he had five nominations before the award, he was able to freeze for days in a refrigerator to record five minutes of penguin croaking.

Speaking of Mark’s previous nominations, here’s the history: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Aladdin (1992), The Fifth Element (1997), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

Mark’s two and a half hour lecture at Audio Forum 2018 was attended by almost 70 people in the room, breathless. We believe that absolutely everyone on that cold November left the room forever changed, more aware of what needs to be done in order to be top experts in a certain field.

November 17, 2018 | 13:30 – 15:30 | online

Video games – the favorite media of Millennials and the generation after them. In its history, Audio Forum has tried to include them in its regular program, but 2018 was a turning point, with as many as three lectures on the topic of video games.

The key lecture among these three was delivered by Ben Minto, Audio Director at EA DICE. In addition to being a wonderful man, who also offers to give lectures remotely (he doesn’t like air travel), he has a very enviable portfolio. From 1999 until today, Ben has worked on various titles from series such as Burnout, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Mirror’s Edge, Medal of Honor, Star Wars. Almost everything DICE has offered over the past 20 years has been the result of Ben’s painstaking work.

Ben is lucky enough to share his workplace with his wife Mari Saastamoinen Minto, Lead Sound Designerof this successful, almost three-decade-old studio. He shares the success of most of the series he worked on with Mari!

Ben Minto is a person we will often see at Audio Forum. Maybe we can persuade him to visit us in person!

November 17, 2018 | 16:30 – 17:30 | online

In the hope that we have correctly transcribed his name from French (and we did, one of us has a mother who is a French teacher), we present to you – Max! He spoke at Audio Forum 2018 via video call from Montreal, in front of a company very important to video game sound design practitioners – Audiokinetic, with the product WWISE.

Max is a Sound Designer/Product Expert – Developer Relations at Audiokinetic helping game developers with the licensing and use of WWISE in their production. We talked about the use of WWISE and good practices in the implementation of sound in video games, which we consider particularly important for visitors to the Audio Forum for whom this area remains underexplored.

Max’s career with sound began around 2010, after enrolling in the „Electroacoustic Studies“ program of the Concordia University, and then the „Digital Music“ program at the University of Montreal. In 2017, Max joins Audiokinetic as a Sound Designer – Developer Relations as the go-to person for the audio community, in order to provide consultations primarily around the WWISE audio middleware. WWISE audio midlvera.

November 17, 2018 | 17:30 – 18:30 | on-site

Nikola is a young businessman, known as the creator of one of the first Serbian cryptocurrencies – GameCredits. He has been involved in software engineering for years, getting into entrepreneurship at the time of GameCredits, as a crypto-investor. Leveraging the strong enthusiasm for blockchain technology, the Soniq Project was born.

Soniq Project has worked to make sure that everyone can freely participate in the music talent competition – as an audience, as sponsors or as competitors, within the product Soniq has been developing. The idea was to eliminate friction endemic to traditional competitions – political bias, sensationalism, foul play. Soniq Stars was a nascent platform built on blockchain technology in which the Soniq Tokenwould be used as currency, ensuring fair play and a chance for everyone to compete solely on their own skills.

Just after a prize Instagram campaign where the invited, aspiring musicians posted recordings of their various musical interpretations, Soniq Project exhaled. Good ideas sometimes simply require a bit of luck.

We hope to see the Soniq Project, one of the sponsors of Audio Forum 2018, play again someday.

November 17, 2018 | 18:30 – 20:30 | online

The charming and in every way exceptional Sylvia Massy was one of the headlining speakers of the Audio Forum 2018. The venue was packed; we’d save air in order to stay longer at the lecture of one of the biggest music producers on the planet.

Silvia’s work is remembered for her work with the bands Tool, System of a Down, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, izvođačima Prince, Bjork, Johnny Cash. We’ll never forget her story about working with Prince: “I’m dying to finally play him what I did and he just storms out of the studio with some girl and leaves.”

Sylvia is the progenitor of very unconventional sound recording techniques: passing audio signals through a cucumber, potato, light bulb; recording the sound of the drum through garden hoses, having the band record from inside the control room, and the like.

She started her career at Tower Records, Larrabee Sound, Sound City Studios, but today Silvija lives and works in Oregon. Her collaborations with Rick Ruben, with whom she recorded bands like Slayer, Danzig, Ghetto Boys, are very well known. Guest appearances in the academic world, workshops, various endorsement videos on YouTube, and even in Pensado’s Place show, are a regular occurrence!

November 18, 2018 | 12:00 – 17:00 | on-site

Slate Virtual Recording Studio (VRS) is a system consisting of a hardware I/O module, special microphones, two 22-inch touch-sensitive displays and an accompanying software package. It was created with the idea to significantly simplify and modernize interaction with virtual studio environments. The accompanying middleware maps the functionalities of the leading DAW environments, and enables direct control of their functionalities through the screens.

One of the main selling points of the Slate VRS is the use of special microphones that, in conjunction with the appropriate software, give the system the ability to model the frequency responses of famous microphones.

The results were quite satisfactory, although not spectacular (which we might have mistakenly expected).

The Presentation of the Slate VRS system took place at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, during the third, bonus day of the Audio Forum 2018. On that occasion, we recorded the guitar and voice in the solo performance of Ivana Vukmirović Manivi, in front of the conference visitors who had the strength for another day of dealing with professional audio.