Thursday 9 February 2012

F-f-f-f-f-fellowship news

Hello from a f-f-f-f-freezing cold York. It got down to -15 degrees Celsius near here the other night. OK, I know that's tame compared some parts of this planet but I like things to be above freezing at least. Had you been making a recording in York Minster at that temperature the reverberation time would be 0.5 seconds longer than it would be at usual room temperature (20 degrees C) because of the lower speed of sound in cold air!

The fellowship is still speeding along nicely, despite the arctic temperatures: Dave Fisher, emeritus professor of Sound Recording for the Tonmeister course, gave me a fascinating hour-long interview last month and more industry luminaries have said they'd like to contribute their thoughts: multiple award winning classical recording engineer Tony Faulkner, Tony Platt (who's worked with artists including Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin) and John Emmit (a supervisor at Thames Television and Oscar-winning broadcast designer).

Sound on Sound magazine are publishing a piece I've written about the project in April, I'm currently putting something together for Physics Review and I'm giving a public lecture in York on Sound Recording and Reproduction at the end of this month. Hopefully by then temperatures and reverberation times will be back to something approaching normal!

(P.S. The Royal Academy of Engineering have started up a blog about engagement and engineering. Take a look here.)