02August21 - Media Release - Kuerti kicks off concert season

Participants in the The Banff Centre’s Audio department, renowned for providing professional training for audio engineers, picked up four out of five first-place awards in the Student Recording Competition during the 113^th Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention in Los Angeles in October, 2002.

The participants, Marie Ebbing, David Houston, and Shawn Everett, under the direction of Theresa Leonard, Director of Audio at The Banff Centre, took home first place awards in various categories:

Classical Stereo Category: Marie Ebbing, Audio Associate/Admin, The Banff Centre
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G Major
Surround Classical Category: David Houston, Audio Associate, The Banff Centre
Brahms: Symphony 1 in C minor: Allegro non troppo ma con brio
Pop/Rock Stereo Category: Shawn Everett, Audio Assistant, The Banff Centre
Like Little Dots In Space, The Boston Post
Pop/Rock Surround Category: Shawn Everett, Audio Assistant, The Banff Centre
Quicksand, The Boston Post

The recordings were judged by an elite panel of Grammy and Emmy-award winning recording engineers, including: Michael Bishop (Telarc International), John Eargle (JBL Professional), and Richard King (Sony Music Studios) in the Classical Music categories; and Bob Ludwig (Gateway Mastering), Frank Filipetti (James Taylor’s Hourglass), and Elliot Scheiner (Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac) in the Pop/Rock categories.

"I am very proud of the three of them," says Theresa Leonard, Director of Audio at The Banff Centre. "I was especially thrilled at the positive reaction from the competition judges to the recordings – it speaks so highly of our programs and the opportunity it provides to the participants to excel and further their skills in this field," says Leonard.

The Audio programs at The Banff Centre provide hands-on training in recording live concerts, and recording music for compact discs and demos. In addition, the programs provide experience in audio post-production for film and television; digital editing and mastering; audio for new media; and audio research. The audio programs at The Banff Centre are internationally recognized and renowned, with alumni working in prestigious studios around the world, including: BIS Records in Sweden, Classic Sound in New York, Skywalker Ranch in San Francisco, Cello and Oceanway Studios in L.A., and 20^th Century Fox.

In June 2003, The Banff Centre will bring together audio engineering professionals, researchers, academics, and manufacturers to Banff for the 24th AES International Conference on the art, science, and future of multichannel audio. For details about the audio programs at The Banff Centre please visit www.banffcentre.ca/music/audio/

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