SoundGirls Living History Project - Dr. Rebecca Mercuri

The SoundGirls Living History project is a collection of interviews with audio industry veterans. The project seeks to highlight the careers and achievements of women and underrepresented groups in audio. Interviews are conducted by SoundGirls members, with guidance from experienced interviewers in the audio industry. Interviews will be available publicly in our Living History Project and for educational use and research and through our social media, YouTube channel, and The SoundGirls Podcast. The oral history interviews are typically unedited and will be archived in their original form. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri's life and career have been an eclectic mix of music and technology, with Bachelor's degrees in Classical Guitar (University of the Arts), and Computer Science (Penn State), Masters degrees in Science (Drexel) and Engineering (UPenn), and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Systems (UPenn). She also holds honorary alumna status from Harvard in recognition of her fellowship year at Radcliffe Institute. In the 1980s, following her undergraduate education, she became an Associate Member of Technical Staff at RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center. Projects there included the development of music software for a personal computer project and the design of the first computer-controlled interactive software and hardware for the RCA VideoDisc player. While in graduate school, during the 1990s, Rebecca was employed at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she pioneered the integration of a holophonic audio system into a collaborative and interactive virtual videoconferencing system. Later, at the University of Pennsylvania, her dissertation, "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances" received immediate attention, as it had been defended 11 days before the 2000 Bush v. Gore election. Dr. Mercuri continues to provide expert testimony on election controversies, and her recommendations about better ways to ensure accuracy, integrity, and believability in election results have been sought and adopted internationally. Notable Software, Inc., the company Rebecca founded (in 1985) to develop and market educational and music-related software under the Apple Certified Developer Program, now (since 2005) provides a wide range of digital investigative and expert witness services for civil and criminal matters. M.O.R.E project below the video: http://n2re.org/m-o-r-e-project Interview By: Christina Milinusic an audio professional who has provided live sound reinforcement since founding her company Unity Sound in 2005. She is the current chapter head for SoundGirls Alberta and has experience working as an electronics technician, technical director, and recordist. Full episode - picking up where we left off here: https://youtu.be/VAOEL-VR6yc?t=1863 https://soundgirls.org/soundgirls-living-history-project/