Immersive audio is a burgeoning industry where new and exciting career opportunities exist for audio engineers, sound designers, and musicians. However, the representation of women and minorities in this industry is low, perhaps even lower than that of the industry at large. Leslie Gaston-Bird (CAS, MPSE, AMPS) is a doctoral student at the University of Surrey in England, and shares her research to date along with some important findings.
Leslie Gaston-Bird (CAS, AMPS, MPSE) is author of the book “Women in Audio”, part of the AES Presents series published by Focal Press (Routledge). She is an Avid Certified Dolby Atmos Professional and Dante Level-3 Certified audio engineer working as a freelance re-recording mixing (dubbing) and sound editing under the banner Mix Messiah Productions. She is also a voting member of the Recording Academy (The Grammys®) and its P&E (Producers and Engineers) Wing.
She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Surrey working on a project titled “Immersive and Inclusive”, for which she received support from Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation programme. From 2016-2018, she was Vice President, Western Region (US & Canada) for the Audio Engineering Society (AES), followed by a term as Governor-at-Large. She was the inaugural chair of the AES Diversity and Inclusion (now DEI) Committee. Prior to that, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Recording Arts at the University of Colorado Denver (2005-2018) where she also served as Chair of the Department of Music and Entertainment Industry Studies.
Leslie has led groups of Recording Arts students in study abroad courses in England, Germany, and Italy which included participation in AES Conventions. Leslie has done research on audio for planetariums, multichannel audio on Blu-Ray, and a has presented several papers at AES conferences, including a comparison of multichannel codecs that was published in the AES Journal (Gaston, L. and Sanders, R. (2008), “Evaluation of HE-AAC, AC-3, and E-AC-3 Codecs”, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society of America, 56(3)).
