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Off The Record

Music & Recording Industry News By Dan Daley
Published November 2011

The Audio Engineering Society's place in recording history is indisputable, but recent events have put its future under the spotlight...

It's been a year for scandals, what with the Murdoch empire's phone-hacking scheme and the one-time leading contender for the next president of France brought down by an alleged encounter with a hotel maid in Manhattan. In that context, one other, considerably less virulent but no less troubling, contretemps involves serious allegations of fiduciary mismanagement at the Audio Engineering Society's headquarters in the US. The organisation's outgoing executive director, scheduled to end in December what has been a lengthy term running the AES, has been accused by the treasurer of the organisation's Los Angeles chapter of actions ranging from breach of trust to, potentially, fraud.

The full outcome of these allegations, and the responses to them (which have just begun to trickle in), will take time to materialise, and the affair will no doubt have been the central theme of gossip at the recent AES Show in New York City. Writing about pending confrontations (legal, financial and otherwise) in a monthly print publication is a highly risky proposition in an era of instant communications. But ironically, this same kind of slow-motion dialogue is currently being played out in cyberspace, on a LinkedIn forum. There, the contrast between the potential speed of online exchanges and the protracted postings of a handful of observers over the course of months underscores some of what might be ailing the AES more deeply. In any event, it presents an opportunity to look at the organisation in the context of what's happened to the music-recording business in the last decade, and to wonder if the relationship between the society and its putative constituency remains as relevant as it once was.

What struck me most, after the allegations themselves, was the lack of widespread reaction, bordering on apathy: within the context of an organisation of over 14,000 members, and of the almost 900 subscribers to the LinkedIn page where the accuser posted his theses, the bulk of the comments comes from little over a dozen users (most of whom have commented multiple times). Even allowing for the fact that most forums have a relatively small percentage of highly active members and a large majority of 'lurkers', given the unfolding drama it's surprising that so few are even acknowledging the issue, much less sharing an opinion on it.

This isn't like watching the Arab Spring unfold every night on CNN or SkyNews and then wondering if you're going to go to McDonald's or Burger King later on. It would be hard to maintain that kind of mental compartmentalisation if you lived in Damascus or Tripoli, so it's hard to understand the seeming lack of broader involvement when it comes to something of this apparent magnitude taking place, in what is essentially pro audio's front yard. Or, perhaps more precisely, pro audio's back office...

The AES is a complex organism, and the work it has done in setting and publishing technical standards and fostering a technical education culture is laudable. As an archival resource for the history of audio recording it's without peer. But the AES's credentials as a scientific entity perhaps cast it in the greatest contrast with an industry that has moved ever further into a lifestyle-based DIY culture, enabled by plug-and-play black boxes with no user-serviceable parts inside. The AES's focus on the technical has the unintended but very palpable effect of giving it something of an ivory-tower perception (one of the featured addresses for this year's AES Convention in New York, for example, is Dr Charles Limb's explication of the parallels between hip-hop and traditional jazz, from the point of view of the physical and intellectual intricacies of musical creativity between sound and brain).

Even the ongoing debate on the LinkedIn page is almost professorial in tone, with all of six exclamation points(!) and hardly any ALL CAPS Internet rant-speak in over a month's worth of dialogue. At the same time, other online discussions reveal a sense of disaffection that's becoming more ubiquitous, even among long-time AES affiliates, such as the technical manager at a major pro-audio brand (that is not exhibiting at the AES Show this year). He writes, "I can record, edit and master small projects for my local high-school bands on my laptop with a small console and a handful of mics. What does the AES have to offer for people that do that kind of production work?”

At the time of writing, the AES Show's exhibitor listing was down over 20 percent from the previous New York show two years ago, and below even the 2010 San Francisco show, which historically has lower exhibitor numbers. This might be the inevitable outcome of the ongoing democritisation of music production, wrought by two decades of digital technology that have brought about a music culture that cares less about the physics of audio, and more about the connection between music and the X Games.

The relocation earlier this year of the TEC Awards from the US AES Conventions to the Winter NAMM shows is telling: the NAMM universe has an ever-larger pro-audio presence, as the boundary between artist and technician continues to erode. This won't be the first time I've speculated that the AES Show itself might become a bolt-on to Winter NAMM. And that could leave the AES itself to do what it's always done best — be the technical backbone that ensures that what goes on inside those black boxes continues to get better and better, and remind us that there's still a connection worth understanding between Edison and Adele.