Creative Music Technology (D Course) - W3G5
The Creative Music Technology programme is a new and innovative degree, carefully designed to equip our graduates with the best chances of employment across the broad range of careers available in the contemporary and computer-based music industry. The programme runs over three years and integrates professional training into those years through specific industry-based modules and module content, visiting speakers, workshops and networking opportunities.
It responds to the same fundamental aim as all our teaching within the department, which is to teach you to think critically about music, and about the contexts in which music functions in contemporary society. It does this principally by providing you with arigorous education in the use and understanding of computer software to generate music within a mass cultural environment.
The programme has four principal aims, each of which relates to an aspect of the way music, and musicians, work in contemporary society:
1. To develop in all our students a diversity of composition-related skills, to equip you to enter the modern music profession.
2. To develop in students a range of critical skills with which to address contemporary music.
3. To provide a rounded undergraduate music education, founded on the music and its practices of the 20th and 21st centuries
4. To create students able both to enter, and to mould, to the contemporary music profession.
Because music technology is now widely available, there is a wealth of courses, at undergraduate level and below, which teach students how to use this technology. It seems to us that in too many places, the technology forms an end in itself, while music acts as a means to that end, as a vehicle to enable the technology to be taught. We intend this programme to work in exactly the opposite way. Although you will become thoroughly familiar with the technology as part of studying with us, that technology is only ever a means to an end, that end being the invention of good music. Indeed, in a sense it doesn’t matter what the technology is, how supposedly ‘dated’ or ‘unfashionable’ it might be – if it enables you to come up with a good result, then it is exactly the right technology for that particular purpose.
Please view the online prospectus Factfile for full details
Level 1
The first year modules will give you a thorough grounding in the principles of music and related technologies plus the opportunity to choose a number of optional subject areas. These include:
Composition Technologies 1 & 2 - this module provides a technical introduction to computer fundamentals. Covers the software that will be used on the degree programme and the current developments in music formats.
Creating Music with Computers 1 - this module strand will develop your understanding of and practical ability in being a computer-based musician.
Electronic Music 1: Theory and Practice - complementing CMC1, this module will introduce you to the history and repertoire of electronic music both within the arts and within popular culture.
Music Industry 1 - this strand covers a number of aspects of the music industry from market exploitation to recording contracts. It also considers the more sociological aspects of music consumption.
Popular Music Harmony - this module covers the principles of harmony across a range of popular music genres including: disco; urban blues; hard rock; punk; contemporary r&b.
Study Skills - this module is designed to equip you with the basic skills required for effective academic study of music.
Sound Design - You will be introduced to the theoretical, aesthetic and practical issues in narrative sound design. Subject areas will be selected from film, TV, documentaries and radio plays. You will investigate how film music functions and how it interacts with sound effects in delivering a narrative strand.
Optional modules include:
Performance 1 - you will receive group coaching in ensembles and individual tuition on your first instrument. You will participate in a range of pop and jazz ensembles giving public concerts and taking part in recording sessions. (Also available at Levels 2 and 3).
Knowledge of Instruments - you will be taught all the basic musical characteristics of most instruments and how to write for them.
Orchestration & Arrangement - you will develop an understanding of the fundamental principles of orchestration and arrangement in a variety of musical styles to approach professional arrangement assignments with confidence.
Understanding Music 1 and 2 - these modules introduce the basic principles of, and ideologies behind, current approaches to the study of a wide range of musical styles. These modules cover popular music, film music, jazz, world music and Western classical music.
Level 2
In the second year you develop the skills that you acquired at Level 1 and study a broader portfolio of optional modules.
Creating music with computers 2 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in Creating Music with Computers 1.
Music Industry 2 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in Music Industry 1.
Synthesis and Sampling - this module develops the student's understanding of various synthesis and sampling techniques through both theoretical and practical approaches. It provides a good working knowledge of digital synthesis and digital signal processing.
Optional modules include:
Electronic & Experimental Music 2 - this course covers the history and aesthetics of electroacoustic music in styles ranging from the post-war avant-garde to electronic dance music of the 1990s. A close study is made of film scores that use electronic music and the module also covers technical information.
Advanced Popular Music Harmony - this module continues and extends work covered in Popular Music Harmony to look at more complex harmonic configurations such as added chords, chromatic harmony, altered chords, borrowed chords.
Creative Applications of Digital Multimedia 1 - this module strand aims to develop an understanding of the role of computer sound design in the context of multimedia works. It will introduce the student to the different data formats and explain their features and benefits. Multimedia covered includes: live action films; animation; computer games; multimedia publishing; and designing for the Internet.
Performance 2 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in Performance 1.
Popular Song Analysis - during this module you will develop analytical strategies pertinent to a range of recorded popular music, and employ these in discovering how popular music works and what it means.
Research Project - students are free to choose their own topic for a detailed study. The project will help develop your research and writing skills.
World Music - introduces the student to styles and genres of music outside the Western classical and popular traditions, and also to ways of thinking about such musics.
Conducting - an introduction to conducting developing gestural and physical techniques for communicative conducting.
Jazz Studies 1 - an analytic and historical look at the main styles of jazz from the late 19th century to the present day
Free Improvisation - an exploration of musical creativity through a theoretical and practical introduction to freely improvised music making.
Level 3
The final year gives you the opportunity to produce a significant portfolio of computer-based music, to work on a large-scale project of your choice and to select a number of courses from a wide choice of optional modules.
Creating Music with Computers Portfolio - you will produce a final year portfolio of computer-based music.
Oral Presentation - for this module you will be expected to make an oral presentation on a topic of your choosing.
Optional Modules include:
Creative Applications of Digital Multimedia 2 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in Creative Applications of Digital Multimedia 1.
Jazz Studies 2 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in Jazz Studies 1.
Performance 3 - a continuation and extension of the work covered in the performance modules at Levels 1 and 2.
African-American Music - you will interrogate and examine the economic, social, political, and cultural contexts in which African-American music originated, developed, and have proliferated.
Anglo-Celtic Song Traditions – this module covers the history, styles, debates and materials of the various Anglo-Celtic ‘folk-related’ traditions.
Dissertation - an extensive research project on a topic of your choosing with one-to-one supervision from a member of staff
Music Therapy – an introduction to the theory and practice of music therapy.
Soundscape Studies - you will develop a practical ability in and conceptual understanding of the use of location and field recordings in compositional and artistic practice.
Studies in World Musics
Pluralism in Western Music - develops the student's awareness of, and ability to critique, the representations of pluralist influences (such as popular musics, the music of other cultures and the music of the distant past) within 20th century Western music.
Progressive Issues in Rock - investigates a discrete repertoire within popular music ('Progressive Rock') and locates it within wider stylistic and cultural tendencies.
Rock Track Poetics - aims to develop students' interpretive faculties with respect to a range of genres of popular music, and to increase the degree of subtlety of cultural location in students' understanding.
Assessment
You will be assessed by coursework and examinations throughout the course. The final degree award is based upon your overall performance in the second and final years.
Note: The course is under constant review, and not every option may be available in any particular year.