Speakers

• Andres Mayo (Chair) Andres Mayo Immersive Audio
  

  Andres Mayo (Chair)

  Andres Mayo Immersive Audio

  Andrés Mayo, former President of the AES (Audio Engineering Society), is an audio engineer and music producer who has pioneered the art of mastering since 1992. He boasts credits in more than 3,000 albums released in all formats, from vinyl through BluRay. Andres co-chaired the first AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality (AVAR), held in Los Angeles in 2016, and since then he has been working tirelessly (together with fellow engineer Martin Muscatello) in the development of techniques and workflows for immersive music production.
  Andres Mayo Immersive Audio boasts a Dolby Atmos – Neumann room and caters for all sorts of deliverables, from 360° podcasts and commercial ads through documentaries and music productions.
  Member of the P&E Wing Advisory Council at NARAS, Andres is a 2-time GRAMMY and 7-time Gardel Award winner.

• Ceri Thomas Content and Studio Enablement, Dolby Music/Dolby Laboratories
  

  Ceri Thomas

  Content and Studio Enablement, Dolby Music/Dolby Laboratories

  Following 15 years in the film and television industries, Ceri joined Dolby as part of their VR program. He is now responsible for content and studio enablement for Dolby Music and is based out of Los Angeles.

• Darcy Proper Proper Prent Sound LLC
  

  Darcy Proper

  Proper Prent Sound LLC

  Darcy began her career at Sony Music Studios in New York City in the Classical Department, later focusing her skills on mastering and broadening her musical scope to include all genres from historical reissues to cutting-edge surround releases. In 2005, she moved to Europe serving as Senior Mastering Engineer at Galaxy Studios in Belgium for several years before moving on to Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands where she currently bases her mastering business.

• Eric Schilling Audio Engineer
  

  Eric Schilling

  Audio Engineer

  Eric Schilling is a music mixer and broadcast music mixer. His awards include: 5 GRAMMY Awards, 15 Latin GRAMMY Awards, 7 Prime Time Emmy Awards, Armstrong Major Broadcast Award and more. At 19 years old, Eric became an assistant recording engineer at the Record Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, CA working with Sly Stone, Joe Cocker and Fleetwood Mac. In 1977 he relocated to Florida to become an engineer at Bayshore Recording Studios where he worked with Jimmy Buffet, Pat Travers, The Outlaws among other legends. While working at Bayshore Recording in 1982, he met Gloria Estefan and their engineer-artist journey started, working together on all of her groundbreaking mega-hit albums and singles. His recent projects have included Immersive mixes for Alicia Keys, Coldplay, Bee Gees, Earth Wind and Fire, and the “God Of War” game soundtrack. His recent broadcast work includes the GRAMMY Awards, the Latin GRAMMYs, Adele’s “One Night Only”, and Elton John’s “Live from Dodger Stadium”. Eric is partner in mediaHYPERIUM studios, and is nominated in 2023 for his immersive mixes of “Divine Tides” by Stewart Copeland and Ricky Kej.

• Frank Filipetti
  

  Frank Filipetti

  Frank Filipetti is a seven-time Grammy-winning music producer, engineer and mixer with a penchant for platinum-selling success.

  Frank earned his first number one album with Foreigner’s triple-platinum Agent Provocateur led by the smash single “I Want to Know What Love Is”. He also co-produced Foreigner’s follow up platinum Inside Information. He has produced and/or recorded and mixed albums for KoRn, Kiss, Rod Stewart’s multi-platinum The Great American Songbook Volumes I and II, Barbra Streisand, George Michael, Luciano Pavarotti, Billy Joel, Andrea Bocelli, Elton John, Frank Zappa and James Taylor, whose elegant Hourglass earned him two Grammy Awards for Best Engineered Album and (as producer) Best Pop Album.

• George Massenburg Associate Professor, Sound Recording & Audio Pioneer
  

  George Massenburg

  Associate Professor, Sound Recording & Audio Pioneer

  George Massenburg is a recording engineer and inventor. In 1972, he authored a technical paper entitled “parametric equalization“ which was presented at the 42nd convention of the Audio Engineering Society. Massenburg participated (individually and collaboratively) in over four hundred record albums over the past 45 years. His work includes recordings of Earth, Wind & Fire, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Toto, Dixie Chicks, Journey, Madeleine Peyroux, Little Feat, Weather Report, Randy Newman, Lyle Lovett, Aaron Neville, Kenny Loggins, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Linda Ronstadt, Herbie Hancock, The Seldom Scene, and many more. He has designed, built and managed several recording studios, notably ITI Studios in Hunt Valley, Maryland, Blue Seas Recording in Baltimore, and The Complex in Los Angeles. In addition, he has contributed to the acoustical and architectural design of many other studios, including Skywalker Sound and The Site in Marin County, California.

• Kseniya Kawko
  

  Kseniya Kawko

  Kseniya Kawko is a freelance producer and recording engineer specialized in classical music
  and jazz. Master of Music McGill University, Master student of the Tonmeister program at the Erich-Thienhaus-Institut in Detmold, winner of multiple AES Student Recording competitions, the recipient of the 2018 Bruce Swedien Award “Music First!” (AES Educational Foundation) and John R.E. Bradley Prize. From 2017 immersive audio is an important part of Kseniya’s professional activity. Her experience includes recording and mixing in formats like Auro-3D, Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos and Binaural. The results of her work in the field of 3D audio appeared as presentations at the conferences of the German Association for Audio Professionals, as well as publications in VDT Magazin and Pro Sound Japan.

• Leslie Ann Jones Director of Music Recording and Scoring, Skywalker Sound
  

  Leslie Ann Jones

  Director of Music Recording and Scoring, Skywalker Sound

  Leslie Ann Jones has been a recording and mixing engineer for over 40 years.
  Starting her career at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles in 1975, she moved to San Francisco in 1978 to accept a staff position at the legendary Automatt Recording Studios. From 1987 to 1997 she was a staff engineer at Capitol Studios located in the historic Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. In February of 1997 she returned to Northern California to accept a position as Director of Music Recording and Scoring with Skywalker Sound, where she continues her engineering career recording orchestral scores, mixing film and video elements and recording and producing music albums. Leslie is a past Chair of The Recording Academy’s Board of Trustees, serves on several advisory boards, and has been both a trailblazer and role model for women in a field largely dominated by men.

• Malgorzata Albinska-Frank
  

  Malgorzata Albinska-Frank

  Frank polish sound engineer and music producer.
  After graduating in music production and sound engineering from the Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw, she began her career as a freelance sound engineer and music producer. Works with internationally known musicians for various music companies, music festivals and radio stations in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. She also teaches recording techniques at the Music Academy in Basel / Switzerland.
  Following her fascination with the classical music, acoustic and acoustical sound of the instruments, she specialised her work on recording and producing music from the Middle Ages through Classic till Contemporary Music.
  In addition to the competence, her clients appreciate mostly subtle sense of hearing, sensibility in order of sound and artistic performance.
  Her productions distinguish high sound quality as well as musicality.

• Ronald Prent
  

  Ronald Prent

  Ronald Prent started his career at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands in 1980 as an inexperienced assistant and has since established himself as one of the most accomplished and innovative recording & mix engineers in the world. In the early years of surround sound, Ronald was a “test pilot” for Sony & Philips’ DSD/SACD format and many of the projects that he mixed in those days are still held up as benchmark examples of creative surround mixing. Ronald has now expanded into immersive sound, pioneering in mixing and playing a key role in the development of new technology used in progressive formats such as Auro3D, Dolby Atmos, and Sony360RA. Some of his recent projects include immersive releases for artists Ozark Henry, Tiësto, Prash Mistry, and Giveon. His efforts were rewarded with a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Immersive album in 2018. Not one to be limited to the studio, Ronald also puts his talents to work in live broadcast, mixing live in stereo and surround/immersive for chart-topping clients around the world.

• Steve Martz Vice President, Global Technology, THX Ltd.
  

  Steve Martz

  Vice President, Global Technology, THX Ltd.
• Thomas Walravens
  

  Thomas Walravens

  Thomas Walravens is a Belgian sound engineer, music producer and mixer.
  After specializing in applied sound for interactive media at the University of Westminster in London, he contributed his expertise to various audio-visual projects in the TV, Music and Cinema industries while teaching sound engineering at the SAE institute of Brussels for four years.
  He then joined a team of software developers working on mixing solutions for immersive sound as an audio testing engineer at AURO-Technologies.

• Tom Ammermann
  

  Tom Ammermann
• Ulrike Schwarz
  

  Ulrike Schwarz

  A broadly acclaimed engineer and producer, Ulrike Schwarz is a trailblazing audio innovator with more than two decades of experience across the film, television, radio, and recording industries. In 2015, Schwarz moved to New York full time to team up with her now-husband and production partner Jim Anderson, with whom she’s created a groundbreaking body of work in the field of immersive audio. Schwarz has garnered multiple Grammy nominations for her work with artists as diverse as American jazz stalwart Patricia Barber, contemporary Norwegian composer Gisle Kverndokk, and soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom. In 2022, Schwarz was named Vice President of the Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (The Association of German Sound Professionals) and received a prestigious grant from the Women’s Fund of the New York Foundation of the Arts for her work on Jane Ira Bloom’s Grammy nominated album (2023) Picturing The Invisible – Focus 1.
  Ulrike received her Tonmeister degree from University of The Arts Berlin, and her MBA from Technical University Munich. Employed by Bayerischer Rundfunk as a senior sound engineer, from 2001-2015, she is now co-owner of the production company Anderson Audio New York. Recent recordings include the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Gonzalo Rubalcaba in Havana, Jane Ira Bloom, Patricia Barber and the orchestral soundtrack of the Oscar winning movie “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

  Active in the AES since 1999, as Governor, Ulrike was made a Fellow in 2015.

• Wilfried Van Baelen MD Auro Technologies, CEO Galaxy Studios
  

  Wilfried Van Baelen

  MD Auro Technologies, CEO Galaxy Studios

  Wilfried Van Baelen, founder of Galaxy Studios and Auro Technologies, is a renowned pioneer in the production of high-end Surround Sound for both music and film. He revolutionized the audio industry with his AURO-3D format, the first ever 3D Audio format with an end-to-end solution for all audio markets. Wilfried also coined “Immersive Sound” and “Immersive Audio” as the new generic term for “Surround sound with Height” adding the missing and final dimension in sound recording and reproduction.

  Wilfried is today CEO and MD of Galaxy Studios Group, Executive Chairman and MD of Auro Technologies.