RIP Prof. Angelo Farina — ESS Pioneer

[thend]

Hi everyone,

I’m sad to share that Prof. Angelo Farina, a major figure in acoustics and audio-measurements, passed away on 22 March 2025.

One of his biggest contributions was the Exponential Sine Sweep (ESS) method: a powerful way to measure impulse responses and separate linear response from distortion. His work on ESS has become a standard tool in audio measurement.

Passing away of Prof. Angelo Farina - EAA Fenestra - European Acoustics Association

About the European Acoustic Association, its national societies, board and executive council.

euracoustics.org

 

[myHRTF]

This is sad news!
Prof. Farina contributed a lot to the field of audio, and he will be remembered for that by the audio community!
In fact, I still remember hacking the content of his AES paper on the ESS method into MATLAB more than 15 years ago. Grazie mille, professore!
My thoughts are with his family.

 

[SSS]

Did not know of it. Sad. Gone too early. RIP

 

[andyc56]

That is very sad

At the bottom of the REW homepage, in the "Reference Material" section, John Mulcahy lists one of Farina's many papers in the reference below. This is for the exponential sine sweep method used in REW:

Angelo Farina, "Simultaneous measurement of impulse response and distortion with a swept-sine technique", 108th AES Convention, February 2000. Available as entry number 134 in this list of papers

I tried going to that page, but it timed out. In case the site is taken down, which I hope it is not, here's a link to the Wayback Machine version of the page, from which you can download many other interesting papers in addition to that one.

 

[Curvature]

Very sad. He was an important person in the science.

 

[amirm]

Oh no! The world of acoustic measurements has benefited so much from his discovery of log sweeps. If you watch his video on it, you see that he used very primitive audio workstation software and forced it to perform this test.

As an interesting aside, even though his class was in Italy, he forced his students to speak English and taught the same! He wanted to make sure that his students could read the body of research out there in English. I watched his entire semester lecture some 15 years ago and it was so wonderful the simple way he explained things. Nothing stuffy like typical college class.

May he rest in peace and memory of him be a blessing for his family and friends.