MMus Sonic Arts

The module enhances your skills in a wide range of sonic arts techniques and creative methods, supported by an understanding of related key concepts, with particular reference to the Electronic Music Studio facilities.

Areas we’ll explore include:

• recording
• editing and mixing
• field recording
• sound transformation and manipulation
• spatial audio formats
• electroacoustic compositional methods
• real-time technologies
• cross art form collaboration

Practical skills are supported by a theoretical understanding of relevant techniques. Special attention is given to multi-channel sound work, and you’ll be able to develop your skills in the EMS Multi-channel Studio. Models of sonic art that explore these various methods are studied. Questions related to the creative challenges of technology-based composition are explored, with reference to issues of interaction, transformation, site/location and context.

The aim of this module is to develop theoretical and critical frameworks for creative sound practice, and to engage with, apply, enact, and experiment with these ideas through practice: a process we could term 'praxis'.

We'll do this by way of lectures, discussions, and tutorials, referring to a variety of artistic practices that use sound in some way. The module explores core concepts, current thinking, and the salient historical and sociocultural contexts of these practices.

Key topics will include:

• the limits of sound
• aural diversity
• autonomous and heterogenous tendencies
• space and place
• the body
• sound technologies
• critical sound studies

This module acts as a focus for the knowledge and skills acquired during the MMus Sonic Arts pathway and gives students the opportunity to undertake independent creative work, employing relevant research methods, creative strategies and contemporary techniques that build upon the advanced and systematic understandings developed in other elements of the Sonic Arts pathway.

It requires substantial independent study, which will be supported by individual consultation with the appointed supervisor, with particular emphasis on Term 3, supported by workshops and other practical activities as applicable. The submission can take the form of an integrated portfolio of sonic arts or a single major creative project. The single project option can include one large work, or a set of works that explore related research questions. The portfolio option will normally consist of three compositions, with a total duration of approx. 30-40 minutes which can be unrelated thematically, utilising different compositional approaches. Both options require a supporting critical essay that demonstrates an understanding of the relevant contextual issues and forms of practice being explored with reference to theory and work by other artists.

This production-centred module provides an introduction to audiovisual composition. It covers several theoretical and practical approaches as well as video production software and techniques.

Students will learn about the history of visual music and other cultural and historical contexts for audiovisual composition. They will analyse and discuss pieces of historical significance along with modern examples.

Finally, they will produce audiovisual work using the theory and examples discussed in class to inform their compositional strategies. Production techniques taught in the module will centre on video editing and processing, but will include other aspects of production such as filming and compression for various distribution formats.

The module engages with practical and conceptual approaches to the composition of music for moving image media – commercial film, art film, television, video, and other forms. Although the module touches upon sound design and the placement of existing music within media, its central focus is music composition to moving image material.

Initial lectures will consider theories of multimedia and the aesthetics of media music, exploring the relationship of music and sound to narrative, structure and concepts in moving image media. A paired sequence of lectures followed by practice-share workshops will consider individual topics, with ensuing short coursework exercises.

Topics may include:

• narrative media scoring
• music in documentary
• library music
• the integrated soundtrack
• audiovisual incongruence and dissonance

Students are free to work within their own choice of style for any of the exercises, and will receive formative feedback and peer-feedback through the workshops. You will submit a summative portfolio of work built on coursework materials, or to your own choice of video material, including collaborations with film makers and animators both in Goldsmiths and elsewhere. A commentary is also required within the portfolio, to explain guiding concepts and content, and to place your work within a theoretical framework, as appropriate.

In this specialist module, you'll explore diverse methodologies for the generation, manipulation and control of the various musical parameters with specific focus on the realms of pitch and rhythm. No stylistic or technical orthodoxy is given particular emphasis, though the module content will necessarily be directed towards the developments of the last 40 years. Whilst systematic approaches will be discussed, these will not preclude consideration of more intuitive methods and how these might be enhanced and extended through the application of more formalised techniques.

You'll concentrate not just on note-to-note generation but also on how the foreground details of pitch choice can be projected over the duration of a work. Specific techniques such as post-serial thinking, spectral composition, stochastic techniques and sieve theory will be examined. It is of module inadvisable, if not impossible, to isolate the element of pitch from other musical parameters, and thought will be given as to how aspects of register, timbre, pacing and rhythm alter our perception and treatment of raw pitch materials. The relationship between time signatures, rhythm, tempo and texture in relation to surface activity and fundamental structure will also be discussed as a means of articulating larger scale formal units and defining /shaping musical material. Aspects of articulation, harmonic pacing, pulse and metre will also be discussed in relation to tempo and musical structure. You'll learn about specific rhythmic techniques including mensuration, modes, resultancy, metric modulation, isorhythm and the derivation of systems through manipulation of numerical and pitch patterns.

To take this module you should have: the ability to read advanced notation and scores; some knowledge of recent developments in contemporary 'classical' music and familiarity with the developments of 20^th Century compositional thought from Webern to Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti etc.

Contemporary music may be viewed as a collection of situated and interconnected practices, in areas including creative, performative, critical and analytical work. This module gives a broad overview of practice and discourse in late 20^th and 21^st century music, and asks you to consider: how might a musical performance contribute to discourse? How might an analytical or critical methodology be practice?

While the module will primarily focus on music stemming from a Western Art Music tradition, contemporary improvised, popular, jazz and electronic musics will also be considered, in order to invite a holistic approach to the discourses and practices that define contemporary music.

You’ll explore and develop a position via your own combination of methodologies, which may include, embodied, analytical, collaborative, (auto-)ethnographic, historical, critically reflective, sociological, and discovery-led approaches, among others. You’ll then articulate your position either as a text-based (essay) or practice-based (performance) project, and in a conference-style video presentation.

The module examines the uses of ethnographic film/video in music research. It will enable you to develop the practical, technical and theoretical skills necessary to make your own short ethnographic film on a music topic in a critical and self-reflexive manner.

Through a critical reading of key ethnographic films about music, the module will address questions of aesthetics, representation and ethics that arise in the process of filmmaking. It will also consider the use of digital media in musical ethnography more generally and assess the methods of analysis afforded by the visual documentation of music practices.

In complement with theoretical seminars, practical workshops on the methods of digital video recording and editing will familiarise you with a variety of approaches to ethnographic filmmaking and techniques of sound recording.

This module explores creative and technical approaches to the design of computer music systems for interactive performance, composition and/or installations in audio and audiovisual practice. The principal software used is Max (Max/MSP/Jitter), however students are welcome to use other environments for generative and interactive processes in addition to or in the place of Max, in consultation with the module coordinator. Several fundamental methods for real-time computer music are investigated, including digital signal processing, synthesis, gesture-following and machine learning. Various paradigms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and audio-visual interaction are explored using a range of performer interfaces, within software environments and using external devices. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and gestural control of electronics are introduced, while the paradigm of 'computer-as-creator' is explored as well using algorithmic and generative methods, including stochastic and artificial intelligence (AI) -related approaches.  

You’ll develop a creative project that explores the compositional and musical possibilities of working with real-time systems, leading to live workshop presentation, video documentation or performance.

To take this module you should be able to:

• apply basic IT skills
• demonstrate understanding of the fundamentals of digital audio
• demonstrate knowledge of studio or notated composition, and/or improvised music and/ or contemporary music performance
• use and edit basic Max patches that will be provided (students are recommended to familiarise themselves with Max prior to the module)

This module investigates the nature of musical material in relation to various musical parameters ranging from pitch, rhythm and texture to notation and instrumentation, seen as a form building elements.  The relationships obtaining between material, microstructure and larger scale formal units will be explored.

Areas to be discussed will include stochastic music, spectral composition, sound realism, microtonality, arborescence, complexity, improvisation and extended instrumental techniques. The module further explores the more recent investigations into the relationship between harmony, texture and form. Musical notations employed by composers since c. 1950 and improvisers in different fields who have (more or less) rejected Western musical notation as a tool will be studied offering an opportunity for composers to experiment and engage with different types of notations in a practical setting.

This module considers music both as the object of philosophy and as an artefact that may both engage with and communicate philosophical ideas. It does so through a joint focus on reading philosophical texts and the examination of musical ‘works’, practices, and approaches.

The module will address the intersections of these ideas through an examination of the methods of the philosophy of music—examining the ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and aesthetics of music through these—and through key topics for the philosophy of music such as the body, the voice, materiality and instrumentality. In examining questions in these topics, you’ll draw on examples from your own musical background as well as those introduced in the module. Seminar discussions will be a key part of the work.

In addition, the module will consider world traditions of philosophy and their implications for the assessment of global music, and the intersection of aesthetics and society in the study and philosophy of musical works. Finally, the philosophy of music beyond the ‘musical’ will be considered, extending philosophical ideas about music into the experience of sound in everyday life.