IoSR Blog : 15 June 2016

2016 End of year event

At the end of each academic year we host an event to celebrate the achievements of students and alumni, and take stock of momentous occasions from the year. It's also a good chance to meet up with friends and alumni, and end the year in style.

Some of the alumni successes of the previous year include Grammy and BAFTA nominations, as well as two Gramophone awards. Amazingly, Tonmeister graduates won three awards from the Music Producers Guild: Brett Cox won Breakthrough Engineer of the year, Olga FitzRoy won Engineer of the year, and Charlie Andrew won Producer of the year. The latter is also a BRIT award. These join the ever-growing list of Tonmeister graduate award winners.

Special guests at the event were Aki Makivirta and Jukka Latva-Hakuni from Genelec along with colleagues from HHB and Source Distribution. Aki and Jukka had spent the preceding two days running a masterclass with students on the specification, positioning and alignment of monitoring systems. On the evening of the event, Aki presented an award of a Genelec 8320 setup to Alastair Bolt: one of the students who participated in the workshop.

Genelec have also sponsored the 22.2 setup recently installed in the ITU-R BS1116-compliant listening room in the Institute of Sound Recording at Surrey.

Aki Makivirta, Research and Development Manager at Genelec, officially opened the new installation, and presented a plaque.

The evening was also used to present prizes to students. We are fortunate that these prizes are sponsored by leading audio companies and individuals, and recognise the high quality of work in both academic and recording work that our students achieve.

This year saw the introduction of a new prize, the BMP Location Recording Prize for the most outstanding location recording made by a second year student. This was awarded to Michael Gerrard.

The Richard Giles Prize for academic achievement in the second year of the course, was presented to Curtis ElVidge.

The Dolby Audio Engineering Prize for the most outstanding recording techniques seminar submission, was presented to Charlotte Thomas by James Shannon from Dolby.

The Dave Fisher Classical Recording Prize for the most outstanding classical recording, was presented to Robert Gilmour by Dave Fisher.

The Adrian James Acoustics Prize for the most outstanding audio research seminar paper, was presented to Charlotte Thomas.

The Jim Abbiss Pop Recording Prize for the most outstanding pop recording, as judged by Jim himself, was presented to Alexandra Webb.

The Focusrite Prize for the most outstanding technical project, was presented to Charlotte Thomas.

The AMS Neve Portfolio Prize for the most outstanding portfolio of recordings, was jointly presented to Wesley Hicks and Christopher Kalcov.

The Woodleyside Tonmeister of the Year Prize for the most outstanding contribution to the course and department, was jointly presented to Craig Cieciura and Christopher Kalcov by Jon Honeyball of Woodleyside IT.

Finally, but most importantly, there was the perfect opportunity to celebrate the year and catch up with friends and make new ones, over a beer or two after the event.

by Russell Mason