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Join us for this fascinating Subject Spotlight as Dr Leslie Gaston-Bird highlights the power of music through performance, technology, and collaboration. In episode one, Leslie outlines the function of a recording studio and defines key attitudes, roles, and behaviours that separate professional recording studios from the rest. Leslie also details the importance of critical listening from the perspective of a performer and an engineer. In episode two, Leslie discusses the role of creativity in making music and lays out key shifts that have changed how creativity looks in a recording studio, such as the impacts of technological advancements. Leslie also looks at the relationship between audiences, genre, and media. In episode three, Leslie explores the technical aspects of microphones and frequencies, explaining their uses and impact on music. Leslie also offers some tips and tricks to help maintain creativity and use microphones and frequencies to your advantage in the recording studio. In the final episode, Leslie discusses why artists cover other songs and analyses this from a creative, audience, and technical perspective. Leslie then sets you a critical listening activity where you’ll listen to different versions of a song and consider what makes each version different.
Dr Leslie Gaston-BirdCity St George's, University of LondonMusic
All episodes
1. The professional recording studio
2. Music - the timeless platform
3. Microphones and frequencies explained
4. Activity - can you hear this?
About the university
City St George's, University of London
Established by royal charter in 1836, City St George’s, University of London is the third-oldest university in England. It has around 48,000 distance learning and campus-based students, making it the largest university by number of students in the UK. City St George’s, University of London is a federation of 17 independent member institutions of outstanding global reputation, ranging from larger universities such as UCL or King’s College London to smaller specialised institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music or the Courtauld Institute of Art. Charles Dickens even termed it the 'People's University'!
City St George's, University of London profile →Meet the academic
Dr Leslie Gaston-Bird
Dr. Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS, MPSE is Seniour Lecturer at City, University of London and President-Elect of the Audio Engineering Society and a Pro Tools | Dolby Professional Avid Certified Instructor and Dante Level-3 Certified audio engineer specialising in rerecording mixing and sound editing. She is author of the book Women in Audio, part of the AES Presents series published by Focal Press (Routledge). She is an Avid Certified Dolby Atmos Professional and Dante Level-3 Certified audio engineer working as a freelance re-recording mixing (dubbing) and sound editing under the banner Mix Messiah Productions. As Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer, she was also nominated for an MPSE Golden Reel award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound for a Non-Theatrical Feature for her work on Publish or Perish, a dark comedy by David Liban. She is also a voting member of the Recording Academy (The Grammys®) and its P&E (Producers and Engineers) Wing. She earned her PhD from the University of Surrey for her dissertation "Immersive but not Inclusive", for which she received support from Innovate UK's Women in Innovation programme. From 2016-2018, she was Vice President, Western Region (US & Canada) for the AES, followed by a term as Governor-at-Large. She was the inaugural chair of the AES Diversity and Inclusion (now DEI) Committee. Prior to that, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Recording Arts at the University of Colorado Denver (2005-2018) where she also served as Chair of the Department of Music and Entertainment Industry Studies. She led groups of Recording Arts students in study abroad courses in England, Germany, and Italy which included participation in AES Conventions. Leslie has done research on audio for planetariums, multichannel audio on Blu-Ray, and a has presented several papers at AES conferences, incuding a comparison of multichannel codecs that was published in the AES Journal (Gaston, L. and Sanders, R. (2008), "Evaluation of HE-AAC, AC-3, and E-AC-3 Codecs", Journal of the Audio Engineering Society of America, 56(3)).
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