Wylie Stateman

1982: Craig Harris was an early expert of the Synclavier manufactured by New England Digital Corporation. It was the very first digital synthesizer piano keyboard that performed computer digital audio sequencing. Harris introduced Stateman to the idea of doing digital sound design with music design tools.

1982: Harry Harris was a US importer who introduced to Hollywood the AMS (Advanced Music Systems) Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to post production. This tool was the first to move entire editorial works into the digital world. It enabled Stateman to apply his rapid prototyping curiosity and quickly transition from film-based analog creative to digital-based creative workflows on computer hard disks - an avant-garde concept at the time when the largest hard disk available was 180MB and had to be registered with the US government.

1982: Scott Gershin met Stateman during the post production period of Tron. Gershin introduced Stateman to a digital audio workstation called "ADAP", which ran on an Atari computer, a precursor to the personal computer. This exposure encouraged Stateman to further embrace digital audio as a means for creative audio exploration and solidified in his mind the mass market potential of these tools in reaching next generation PCs.

1979: Lon Bender met Stateman at Warren Sound West in Hollywood, an early post production sound facility and recording studio. They worked together as young sound editors on a series of films including Coal Miner's Daughter, Wolfin, and Southern Comfort, while incubating their original idea for Soundelux. Their collaboration resulted in the successful development of many companies (identified below).

1977-78: Professor Mort Rosenfelt was a University of Utah Film School professor who taught Stateman at the very beginning of his career in Park City, UT. When working for Sunn Classic Pictures, the largest independent producer of content outside of Hollywood during its time, Rosenfelt took a sabbatical to set up Sunn Classic's post production department and mentored 20 young filmmakers on in-house post production systems. He taught Stateman post production theory and a rapid prototyping approach to problem-solving, whereby students were forced to completely rethink different angles to solve the same problem.

Wylie Stateman (born November 20, 1957) is an American sound director, supervising sound editor, sound designer, and post production media entrepreneur. Stateman has supervised over 150 sound projects, resulting in 9 Academy Award nominations, 6 BAFTA Awards, 3 Primetime Emmy Awards, and over 30 Motion Picture Sound Editor Awards. He also received a Science Technology award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1994 for Audio Track’s Advanced Data Encoding (ADE) System. In 2021 he won an Emmy Award for his sound design in Netflix’s original series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.