Episode #306 – Spotify Accounts Hack, Music Gear And Tech, And Post Engineer Leslie Gaston-Bird

My guest on this episode is Leslie Gaston-Bird, who is a post-production engineer, governor-at-large for the Audio Engineering Society, and a former Associate Professor of Recording Arts at the University of Colorado Denver. Leslie's first gig was at National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, D.C. where she worked on shows like “Morning Edition.” “All Things Considered”, “Talk of the Nation” and “Performance Today,” She then moved to Colorado Public Radio where she earned the Radio and Television Digital News Association’s Edward R. Murrow Award for Large Market Documentary. It was in Denver where she started her career in post-production at the Post Modern Company restoring soundtracks for classic Sony / Columbia films dating as early as the 1930’s. In 2011 she was granted a Fulbright award to research Blu-Ray audio at the University of York in York, England, which led to ongoing research with Dolby Labs. She’s also the author of the book Women In Audio. During the interview we spoke about working at NPR in the days of tape, cleaning up movie soundtracks before noise reduction plugins, tracking down women audio pioneers to interview, and much more. On the intro I’ll take a look at Spotify accounts being hacked, and how the music and audio gear business lives comfortably with technology.