How To Shake “I Suck at Math” Mentality

Dr Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS, MPSE is Past President of the Audio Engineering Society and a Pro Tools | Dolby Professional Avid Certified Instructor and Dante Level-3 Certified audio engineer specializing in rerecording mixing and sound editing. She is author of the books Math Fundamentals for Audio (A-R Editions, 2019), and  Women in Audio, part of the AES Presents series published by Focal Press (Routledge, 2019). 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. As Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer, she was also nominated for an MPSE Golden Reel award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound for a Non-Theatrical Feature for her work on Publish or Perish, a dark comedy by David Liban. She is also a voting member of the Recording Academy (The Grammys®) and its P&E (Producers and Engineers) Wing. She earned her PhD from the University of Surrey for her dissertation "Immersive but not 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 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. She 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, incuding 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)).

As a New Zealand-native living in the northern hemisphere, Rebekah understands very well how important it is to be connected even when separated by oceans; there is no excuse for creativity to suffer just because of where we are in the world. Her background as composer, software and networking programmer, and technology researcher saw her merge those passions when co-creating the industry standard in audio remote-recording software: Source-Connect. As CEO and technical director of Source Elements for twenty years, she promotes network technology in the production and digital arts and advocates for technology access and education, in order to enable economic and social growth and independence. Rebekah is an active participant in the drive towards a more inclusive industry, especially focused on supporting young and underrepresented persons who are looking for career support in music technology. Nothing would make her happier than to see more music tech businesses started by women and other marginalized groups. She also continues her research in the arts and network technology: she imagines a future where internet/music/film/media technologies merge, lessening the distances between time-based creators, artists, educators and students around the world and perhaps even further, to wherever humans will travel.