28 October - 10 November 2015

This is a very personal and by no means exhaustive overview of my 2015 trip to the US of A, including the 139th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society and the 10th Art of Record Production Conference. 
Selected tweets from @BrechtDeMan and @AESsda

New York

139th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society at Javits Convention Center
Read my report on all C4DM-related activities here. 
More information on Twitter and Facebook via the #AES139 hashtag. 

Wednesday 28 October
Ian Corbett's birthday and reunion of AES regulars in the Pony Bar!
Thursday 29 October
Meeting with Yamaha regarding evaluation of 12 months of collaboration, and extension thereof for the next 12 months. Their studentship thus supports the (supposedly) final two years of my doctoral research! I feel very grateful to be able to work with them and receive this type of validation of the work I've been doing for three years. 
Opening of the Student and Career Development track in the first Student Delegate Assembly meeting, and student party at NYU's James L. Dolan Recording Studio. 
Friday 30 October
Paper of close collaborators Alex Wilson and Bruno Fazenda, using multitracks from Mike Senior's multitrack library - which we are currently absorbing in the Open Multitrack Testbed. 

Prism Sound party at Sterling Sound mastering studios in Chelsea, Manhattan, on the birthday of Prism founder Graham Boswell! no less! A great place, but sadly one that will not exist for much longer as the lease expires and real estate prices force the studio to close its doors as soon as 2018. 
Saturday 31 October

Many student events, including a massively successful and well-attended Education and Career Fair: 
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Poster presentation: David M. Ronan, Brecht De Man, Hatice Gunes and Joshua D. Reiss, "The impact of subgrouping practices on the perception of multitrack mixes," 139th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, October 2015. [BibTeX]
Second party at Sterling Sound - this time it's the AES President's reception. 
Sunday 1 November
Tutorial T21: "Advances in Semantic Audio and Intelligent Music Production" along with Ryan Stables (Chair), Josh Reiss and Thomas Wilmering. 
As I was usually running a session or organising the next one, and filling up all the gaps meeting with people I only see once every six months at the most, I have missed most of the sessions I would have wanted to see, but all in all it was certainly a good Convention, if quite exhausting. 
Finally, some free time! Visiting Top of the Rock and Katz's Delicatessen. 
I wrote a more detailed report on C4DM's presence too. 

Stamford

2 November
Visiting HARMAN International HQ in Stamford, Connecticut, whose first and second ever scholarship I received from the AES Educational Foundation, two years after first visiting them after the 135th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society. 
They're always very nice and generous... So many awesome products under that roof. 

Chicago

Visiting Bryan Pardo, Mark Cartwright and others at the great Interactive Audio Lab of Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Presenting my research and learning about all the great work going on there. I've also had a chance to spend an hour or two in downtown Chicago, and an evening in the famous "Green Mill" speakeasy. 

Phildelphia

After this very short but busy trip to Chicago, the last stop was Philadelphia, where the 10th Art of Record Production Conference took place. 

See also Joe Bennet's blog and the #ARP2015 hashtag on Twitter and Facebook for a more extensive report of the Conference. 
I was fortunate enough to present my paper, "Mixed reviews: evaluation through peer review in audio education", the very first day. It will probably appear as a Journal of the Art of Record Production later in reworked form. 
In it, some resources I discussed were the Open Multitrack Testbed and the Web Audio Evaluation Tool, both of us were developed over the course of my doctoral research to assist with the mix experiments and listening tests I discussed in this talk. See also the Software tab of this website. 
There were a few other personal highlights, related to audio education and music archives (both of which relate to my recent work), particularly Kirk McNally's (University of Victoria) paper "What the masters teach us: Resources and approaches in multi-track audio archives" which mentioned our Open Multitrack Testbed as well. 
The main appeal of this conference is the great community of audio researchers and educators though, much like the AES albeit with less technical interests mostly. 
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Beautiful streets just South of Philadelphia's city center