Audio Scholarship Recipients Announced

Natick, MA (August 15, 2024)—Genelec, in association with the Audio Engineering Society Educational Foundation, has announced the recipients of its annual scholarships.

The Genelec Dr. Ilpo Martikainen Audio Visionary Scholarship, in the amount of $5,000, was established in 2018 in honor of Genelec’s late founder Dr. Ilpo Martikainen. This year’s Martikainen Scholarship recipient, Miles Scharff, a graduate student at Columbia University, is a sound artist and improviser who works in radio electronics, sound sculpture, spatial audio, and performance. His current research investigates the ways in which physical objects can be unintentional sites of reception and transmission for electromagnetic and acoustic signals, and how we can have unexpected listening experiences at these sites.

“Unintentional” points to the fact that these sites are in some transitive space between the sender and the receiver of an electromagnetic signal, or signals produced as a byproduct of technological infrastructure. Scharff’s work seeks to document or fabricate these interactions between physical objects and invisible signals as a way of witnessing, listening to, this electromagnetic ecology. The want to witness is effectively a want to explore how our awareness of pervasive acoustic and electromagnetic signals, whether we are experiencing them audibly or non-audibly, affects our relationship to our environment and our bodies.

Scharff has designed and built wave field synthesis arrays for installations and experiences for The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Rube Goldberg Foundation. He has exhibited sound sculptures at the Fridman Gallery and the Wallach Gallery in New York City, as well as Alice Holt Forest for Sensing the Forest in the U.K. He has received the Dean’s Travel grant from Columbia University to record natural radio signals in Iceland using receivers he has designed and built. Scharff performs freely improvised music with his trio, TGH Hiss Ensemble, who just released their debut album. He received his bachelors in Physics and Music Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently an MFA candidate for Columbia’s Sound Art program.

AES Educational Foundation Awards 18 Students

The Genelec Mike Chafee Audio Pioneering Scholarship was established to promote the advancement of women in the audio industry while paying tribute to noted long-time Genelec manufacturer’s representative, audiophile, sound designer, acoustician, audio evangelist and supporter of women in audio, Michael Chafee. The scholarship, also of $5,000, is offered annually to U.S. female graduate students in the field of audio engineering who are members of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

Chafee Scholarship recipient Logan Kibler is a student at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, having studied as an undergrad at University of Michigan, earning a BSE in Computer Engineering and a BS in Sound Engineering. She graduated with high honors from the School of Music and Magna Cum Laude from the College of Engineering. During her studies, she held several positions on the board of the UM Student Chapter of the Audio Engineering Society, including chair for a year and a half. In the summer of 2020, she was a student assistant for the Girls in Music and Technology high school summer camp put on at UM.

During the following summers, she interned with Dolby Laboratories as the audio software engineering intern working on the professional audio encoder, and Subaru R&D as the sound engineering intern researching new methods of sound and system design for vehicles. She also participated in an audio system design professional internship with Disney Live Entertainment, where she learned about designing systems for new theme park offerings ranging from small one-off events to permanent installs in park expansions.

Kibler continues to write and record songs as part of the duo Madelyn & Logan, which she has done since 7th grade and which she credits as the foundation of her love of music and audio technologies. Kibler is currently at Walt Disney Imagineering in California as an A/V engineering intern working on audio and video systems for rides and area development.