Peter Swarte is op 19 november 2016 op 74 jarige leeftijd overleden.
Een beminnelijk man is heengegaan.
Peter Swarte died November 19, 2016 after a slowly progressing illness at the age of 74.
Born in The Netherlands. He became interested in sound reproduction in his very youth when he started building his own radio’s. When he visited an international meeting on electronics and audio, he found out that high fidelity sound was his passion. By the time he had finished his secondary school he had built so many amplifiers, loudspeakers and record players that he decided that he wanted to become a professional developer of audio equipment.
He began his professional career as a developer of professional microphones and loudspeakers at Philips Electronics in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1964. He received a B.Sc. degree in physics and developed several types of magneto-dynamic, piezoelectric, electrodynamic and electret transducers for commercial, professional and security applications.
In 1977 he began working as an applications engineer for professional audio systems. In this capacity he educated and supported sales and project engineers worldwide within the Philips Electronics organization in the design and realization of emergency sound systems, e.g. in sports stadiums, emporiums, airports, and congress centers. He got patents for active absorption and reflection systems and capacitive transducers.
From 1987, as group manager, he gathered extensive application knowledge about worldwide data networks, videoconference systems and digital audio communications. He worked together with scientists for the application of an automatic interpretation system where the phenomena of speech and intelligibility were of crucial importance.
Since the beginning of 1998, he was an independent consultant for acoustics and electro-acoustics. Together with dr. Ronald Aarts of the Philips Research Labs he developed the "dormant Base" ("dB") equipment for the elimination of annoying sound emitted by discotheques and entertainment centers.
Until the beginning of this year, Peter taught a postgraduate course in electro-acoustics in Belgium.
He was vice chairman and later on chair of the Netherlands’ AES Section. He was the chairman for the 110th (2001), the 114th (2003), and the 124th (2008) AES conventions all in Amsterdam. Peter was governor for the AES for a term of two years starting by October 2003 and Vice President for the Northern European Region as off November 2006 till November 2008. More recently from 2010 untill 2015 he served again as a committee member of Netherlands’ AES Section.
Surviving are his children and grandchildren.
Ronald Aarts and Okke Ouweltjes, Philips Research, The Netherlands