HKU researcher Eelco Grimm wins international AES Fellowship Award

16 May 2022

HKU's Music & Technology lecturing researcher Eelco Grimm has received the prestigious AES Fellowship Award for his years-long research of normalisation and loudness in music. 'I am greatly honoured by becoming an AES Fellow. It is truly a sign of appreciation.'

AES (Audio Engineering Society) is the international professional and scientific organisation for sound engineering. Grimm has now become a fellow after researching loudness in the music, television and movie industries. Since 2005, he has been researching on behalf of HKU. It revealed that sound was often too loud or not mixed properly. Examples of this were soft voice tracks and commercials mixed too loud, while some movies were so loud that cinemas turned down the volume, causing other movies to sound too low. With the volume standards to which Grimm contributed, nobody can make a mix that sounds much louder than those of others. This creates room for everyone to present a dynamic sound mix.

Grimm has researched almost the full sound spectrum in his 18 years and worked with various renowned parties. He was allowed to study the whole library of music streaming service Tidal, containing over 4.2 million albums. Thanks to his research, the standard for the online entertainment world is now set between -14 and -18 LUFS (Loudness Unit Full Scale). This is a measure of the loudness of your album, podcast or movie. The international broadcasters have a standard of -23 LUFS.

‘It is truly fantastic! After 18 years of commitment, this comes as a great honour. Truly a sign of appreciation for my years of research. Naturally I haven’t done this all on my own, so I give my thanks to all my colleagues and HKU for our cooperation.’