Every autumn, the young professionals group of the German Acoustical Society (DEGA) meets for several days at an acoustics institute somewhere in Germany. The aim of the workshop is to explore the diversity of acoustics, foster professional exchange, and build new connections.

This year, the work­shop took place in Det­mold. It was or­gan­ized by Stef­fen Wurl­itzer, a mas­ter’s stu­dent in Mu­sic Acous­tics, who suc­cess­fully brought the young DEGA to the Erich Thi­en­haus In­sti­tu­te (ETI).

In ad­di­tion to guided tours of the labor­at­or­ies and re­cord­ing fa­cil­it­ies at ETI as well as the con­cert hall, the pro­gram strongly em­phas­ized sci­en­tif­ic ex­change. Lec­tures by Prof. Malte Kob and Prof. Timo Grothe provided in­sights in­to cur­rent top­ics in mu­sic­al acous­tics. A spe­cial high­light was an in­ter­view with the re­cently re­tired Prof. Wern­er Dab­ring­haus, of­fer­ing a per­son­al per­spect­ive on the work of a ton­meister and the de­vel­op­ment of the field.

Previous Next

The work­shop on mod­u­lar syn­thes­izers, led by Mat­thi­as Krumme (Uni­versity of Pader­born), also at­trac­ted great in­terest. For many par­ti­cipants, this ses­sion re­vealed a strong mu­sic­al in­clin­a­tion, which later found ex­pres­sion in an in­form­al even­ing jam ses­sion.

Sci­entif­ic soft skills were an­oth­er im­port­ant com­pon­ent of the work­shop. In a writ­ing and peer-re­view work­shop led by Dr. Hartig Junge and or­gan­ized in co­oper­a­tion with the plat­form wiki.au­dio, par­ti­cipants were able to deep­en their skills in re­view­ing sci­entif­ic pub­lic­a­tions.

Later, en­tirely new fields were ex­plored dur­ing a vis­it to the Cre­at­ive In­sti­tute Os­twest­falen-Lippe (KIO). Cur­rent re­search top­ics ran­ging from vir­tu­al acous­tics and VR to mu­sic in­form­at­ics and 3D au­dio were presen­ted. A par­tic­u­lar high­light was the con­tem­por­ary con­cert “Climb” by Maria Kalion­pää and Dav­ide Mauro, fea­tur­ing a mu­sic­al com­puter game com­posed spe­cific­ally for Disk­lavi­er.

The work­shop vividly demon­strated the di­versity, vi­tal­ity, and in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary nature of acous­tics, high­light­ing the im­port­ance of per­son­al ex­change for young re­search­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers in the field.