Director and Professor of Music Production & Recording Technology Golder O’Neill ’92, M.M.E., participated in the 2nd annual Pan-American Audio Educators Conference in Mexico City in April. The conference featured presentations and discussions regarding audio education in higher education. Many interesting topics were presented and discussed, including:

• Steal My Syllabus 
• How Are Educators Implementing Immersive Audio Within Our Programs? 
• Machine Learning and AI Music Production — What Should Educators Anticipate? 
• Collaboration Between Developers and Educators 
• The Human Side of Audio 
• Developing a Curriculum for Audio Archiving, Preservation, and Restoration 
• Non-Traditional Pathways to Audio Education 

The conference coincided with the Latin America Sound Check Expo, a four-day event that serves as the sister event to the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show held in the United States. During the conference, audio educators discussed common challenges currently facing both the classroom and the audio industry. The hottest topic of discussion was teaching AI (artificial intelligence) in the classroom and how educators should embrace it — or whether they should at all.

The event also featured listening sessions sponsored by Genelec, presented in both immersive audio and stereo formats. One of the most exciting presentations of the conference was Lenise Bent’s presentation on “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp. As the recording engineer on the album — as well as projects for artists such as Blondie and Steely Dan — she described both the technical recording process and the creative interactions among the musicians during production.

Other listening session presenters were audio engineers Michael Romanoski, Jeff Wolpert, Josh Rogosin, Claus Trelby and Max Blázquez.

The Pan-American Audio Educators Conference is a gathering of audio educators from around the world; they discuss and share ideas and practices of audio education. The conference was led by John Krivit, former president of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and founder of Facebook’s “Hey Audio Student” which has over 231.3K members.