Producing Ecstasy
No matter what happens to, for and against music, it will 'remain in light' as the vehicle whereby ecstasy is produced. After all that has happened with music, from analog to digital, from material to immaterial, from MP3 to the miraculous Resurrection of Vinyl itself, music will always cycle back to the production of ecstasy on demand. If human beings have always required ecstasy, do they need it now more than ever? Is the technology getting in the way?
Presenters
Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, policy pundit and the Deputy Director of Future of Music Coalition. He gives frequent talks at conferences and campuses on issues at the intersection of creativity, technology, policy and law, and is a go-to source for major media outlets from NPR to the New York Times. Casey works alongside leaders in the music, arts and performance sectors to bolster understanding of and engagement in key policy and technology issues, and has written dozens of articles on the impact of technology on the creative community. Casey is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and serves on the Board of Directors of the Media & Democracy Coalition and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. He is the owner/operator of Lux Eterna Records and records and publishes under The Contrarian moniker.
Sandy Pearlman/MicroBio
Visiting Professor and past Schulich Distinguished Chair, McGill University. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the History of Ideas at Brandeis and New School Fellow in Sociology and Anthropology. Over the last few years, at McGill, Pearlman, has taught, and, often in collaboration with former Dean Don McLean of the Schulich School of McGill, created, a boatload of provocative new courses in the Music, English, Religious Studies, Law and Management Faculties. Relentless brainstormer of the ever-tightening embrace of Music by Technology and Technology by Music. Member of the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress. Producer, creator, songwriter, manager and theorist for many of the most important bands and musical trends of the last 25 years: Blue Oyster Cult, Clash, Black Sabbath, Dictators, Pavlov’s Dog, Dream Syndicate, Space Team Electra… Described by the Billboard Producer’s Directory as “the Hunter Thompson of rock, a gonzo producer of searing intellect and vast vision.” Gonzo enough to be played by Christopher Walken in Saturday Night Live’s infamous skit on the making of “The Reaper” (which Pearlman produced for Blue Oyster Cult). One of the first of the teen age Rock Critic cabal (see “Almost Famous”), he is usually credited with inventing the use of the term “Heavy Metal ” for that music, during his time as a founder, editor and writer at Crawdaddy magazine. Consultant to, and scourging critic of, overweight (but undernourished) multinational entertainment conglomerates, stressing out on declining market share and growing irrelevancy. President and Owner of the seminal American alternative label, 415 Records. A founder of EMusic.com (the first of the downloading companies, way back in 1998). A principal of Moodlogic (creator of omniscient trans-media navigation and recommendation engines for the likes of Sony and Microsoft). Framer of many of the key terms of the current public discourse concerning “the Future of Music.” Visiting Lecturer on these issues at such academic venues as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Calgary, Stony Brook, McGill, assorted Universities of California (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Hastings College of the Law), as well as the Mill Valley Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Southbank Festival, Canadian Music Week, Montreal Pop Festival, SXSW, etc. His (now famous or notorious) proposal for the “5 Cents Solution” to the total re-architecting of the music business, rolled out as the output of his work at McGill, has remained rampant in print, radio, TV and the Internet, since first appearing in an interview he did with the Toronto Globe and Mail. At McGill, he, and his associates are currently involved in architecting an all-encompassing project for construction of a "Grand Unified Field Theory of the Future of Music", incorporating the “5 Cents Solution” and the parallel emergence of the "Paradise of Infinite Storage" and new hybrid analog-digital codecs, for music and media objects in general. In total, perhaps the most disruptive game changer yet.
As a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, George Massenburg left in disappointment in university education and has never looked back. He joined the McGill faculty as an adjunct professor in 1996, and in the fall of 2010 joined the faculty full-time.
He designed, authored and presented the 1972 AES paper on Parametric Equalization and is regularly published in professional journals and trade magazines worldwide. George was chief engineer of Europa Sonar Studios in Paris, France in 1973 and 1974, and also did freelance record engineering and equipment design in France and England during those years. Moving to Los Angeles in 1975, he made scores of highly regarded recordings, many of which were hugely successful.
Massenburg chartered several electronics companies, most notably GML, INC (now GML, LLC) in 1982 to produce high-performance, high-resolution recording equipment. His notable developments are the parametric equalizer itself (now in its third generation in the digital domain), the third-generation moving fader automation system & other control systems for audio recording consoles, and reference-precision level detectors.
With Massenburg Design Works, he has developed the industry-standard digital EQ plug-in for Digidesign ProTools HD, the Sony Oxford OXF-R3 digital console, Sonic Solutions HD Mastering System, TC Electronics and the Mackie D8B, among other systems.
George is currently Adjunct Professor of Music Technology at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, and lectures at other colleges and universities, including Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, University of Memphis, in Memphis, Tennessee and Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo. He is Chairman of the Technical Council on Studio Practices for the Audio Engineering Society. He is a member of the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress and an advisor to the Committee for Library Information Resources. In 2004 he was made a Fellow in the Audio Engineering Society, and received the Gold Medal from the AES in 2008. Along with Linda Ronstadt, Smokey Robinson, and Juan Luis Guerro he received and Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of Music in May, 2009.
He has produced or engineered recordings for, among many others, Linda Ronstadt , Aaron Neville, Little Feat, James Taylor, Randy Newman, Lyle Lovett, Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Dixie Chicks, Billy Joel, Earth Wind and Fire, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Natalie Merchant, Carly Simon and Michael Ruff. He has been nominated many times for the non-classical engineering Grammy (most recently in 2002 for Mary Chapin Carpenter). His projects have been nominated for Record Of The Year in several years, and has himself won four Grammies, one for Best Engineered Non-Classical in 1990, (for Linda Ronstadt's, “Cry Like A Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind”), for Best Producer (Children’s Record, Linda Ronstadt’s “Dedicated To The One I Love”), and for Best Bluegrass Record ("Mountain Soul II" by Patty Loveless) in 2011; he was awarded the Recording Academy's Technical Grammy for 1997 for numerous contributions to the art and technology of the modern recording studio. He also won the Academy of Country Music Record Of The Year for 1988 (for “The Trio”), and both the Mix Magazine Producer and Engineer Of The Year Awards for 1989 (for Little Feat), and Engineer Of The Year Award for 1991 (for Linda Ronstadt), and 1992 (for Lyle Lovett). He delivered keynote addresses to the 50th anniversary of the Audio Engineering Society in New York in October 1997, to the 24th Conference on Multichannel Audio in Banff, Alberta in June 2003, and to the Surround Pro 2003 conference in Los Angeles, December 2003. He guided the acoustical design and construction for Blackbird Studio C, a innovative, post-modern, acoustically-advanced (highly-diffuse) multi-purpose room for recording and mixing.
Professor Don McLean has been Dean of the Faculty of Music of the University of Toronto since January 2011, where he and his colleagues are pursuing an ambitious program of renewal and expansion. From 2001-2010, he was Dean of the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montreal and Chair of the Board of CIRMMT (its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Professor McLean’s research areas include the music of Alban Berg and New Viennese School, motive and hierarchy in Schenkerian theory and analysis, the emotional impact of music across multiple genres, and the policy and practice of higher education in music. Renowned for his innovations in interdisciplinary teaching and research, and success in infrastructure development, he speaks internationally on the changing context of music in the academy and in society.
Friday, March 16
