BMus/BSc (Hons) Electronic Music, Computing and Technology

This module will introduce you to the fundamentals of programming and object orientation, including the following basic ideas of programming:

• variables
• memory and assignment statements
• control through conditional statements, loops
• functions and procedures
• objects and classes
• instance variables and methods
• arrays
• user interaction
• interaction between objects. 

This module covers the perceptual and technical fundamentals of sound and music computing. 

Topics include:  

• fundamentals of auditory perception: frequency/pitch, amplitude/loudness, and timbre 
• applying and manipulating digital audio media for interactive contexts 
• sound synthesis theory and fundamentals 
• basic signal analysis and visualisation techniques 
• rudimentary digital signal processing. 

You'll apply this knowledge through a series of practical and creative exercises undertaken throughout the module using an appropriate programming environment with supporting audio libraries.

This module will introduce you to critical questions in contemporary musicology and the study of contemporary musics. You'll be equipped with the critical, theoretical, and practical tools with which to advance your study of music throughout the degree programme.

You'll explore examples drawn from Western popular and classical musics from the 20th and 21st centuries, and electronic music and sound art. You'll examine how global traditions of musics may trouble the kinds of questions that musicologists may ask of contemporary musics and consider the alternative music ‘histories’ of the 20th and 21st Centuries that could be explored. Rather than take a historical overview of its themes and topics, the module is structured around key questions in order to:

• Consider the ways that recent and contemporary music has been thought and written about.
• Explore historical cultural contexts.
• Develop your skills in critical reasoning, conducting research and presenting spoken and written arguments.

You'll be encouraged to think about relationships between musics, as well as between musicians, their works and their contexts. You'll engage with appropriate ideas from such disciplines as historical studies, sociology, cultural studies, ethnomusicology and musical analysis. 

Your learning in this module will be supported by regular meetings with your personal tutor group. Through this group, you'll reflect on your learning journey in the module and relate your experiences in your programme as a whole. These sessions will allow you to make and explore connections between this module and your personal musical experiences, and to relate the study skills gained through their learning to their programme more broadly, and future plans.

This module will develop your knowledge and understanding of core music computing concepts, including the fundamentals of digital audio, sound synthesis, sampling, filters, wave shaping, spectral analysis, and instrument design.

The basic theory of digital signal processing is introduced with examples of time and spectral domain processing as well as physical modelling. You'll use a programming language for music computing purposes and explore algorithms to generate musical structure and content.

You'll be introduced to decision-making strategies appropriate to both user-interface design and organising temporal structure, leading to the production of musical compositions as well as digital audio tools. Finally, you'll be asked to reflect critically on the value systems such an approach can connote and position your work in a larger historical and aesthetic context.

In this module, you'll explore s a variety of approaches to live musical performance with new technology.

Three specific approaches are examined:

• performing with semi-automated material e.g. with Ableton Live
• performing with gestural digital instruments e.g. using iPhone accelerometers
• integrating electronics sound and processes with acoustic instruments.

You'll engage with all three approaches through lectures, case studies, workshops and master classes and will draw on these experiences to develop an engaging final performance.

In this module, you'll develop your composition and production skills in electronic music and critically engage with electronic music history from various perspectives and contexts.  

This module includes workshops in studio environments, such as the Electronic Music Studios and the Goldsmiths Music Studios, to enable you to develop fundamental electronic studio techniques and explore a range of composition and production techniques. Through listening and analysis, you'll develop your understanding of the cultural and technological context of key genres of electronic music, and produce original works of electronic music composition in response to briefs. You'll be assessed both on your production and composition skills and on your critical engagement with electronic music history.

In this module, you'll explore advanced topics in Music Computing such as generative and reactive compositional systems, machine learning tools, and live electronics.

You'll use a programming language for music computing purposes and explore algorithms to generate musical structure and content. You'll complete several smaller projects while they work towards the production of a concert hall performance for live performer and accompanying software.

In this module, you'll explore jazz performance through the lens of contemporary UK practice from the 1980s to the present day. You'll need some experience performing in small Jazz ensembles where improvisation is deployed in shaping the musical material (for example in the department’s Creative Jazz Workshop ensemble).  

Delivered jointly at level 5 and 6 as mixed activity, you'll approach the work of key creative jazz practitioners through analysis and evaluation, supported by your independent research. You'll apply knowledge from these activities practically (to given or related source material) in ensemble performance workshops. Here students at L5 and L6 will combine to form jazz performance ensembles which will vary over the course of the module

As well as considering stylistic musical parameters (groove, harmony, meter, melody, vocabulary, instrumentation etc.) you'll consider issues that have shaped and are currently shaping the UK jazz horizon such as heritage, race and gender. You'll investigate how these issues establish and consolidate the notion of “scene”, allowing you to locate your personal practice in relation to this.

Co-requisite: Techniques in Jazz

This module builds on the knowledge developed in C++ for Creative Practice by introducing you to a variety of specialist topics relevant to creative practice. This will be done through a project developed in weekly stages covering topics such as Networking with OSC, Event-driven programming with lamdas, memory management and smart pointers, developing GUIs, error handling, and test-driven development.

Through this grounded and practical work, students build greater knowledge of C++ syntax and techniques.

This module will introduce you to the process of running an independent research project in Creative Computing. It aims to prepare you for the independence of your final year, self-initiated research project. You'll be provided with direction, structure and a given theme that you'll research and explore through a series of workshops and formative projects, leading to an assessed exhibition and final project report in the style of your final year project. 

Example projects include a software tool for creative work, portfolio of creative studies, an installation, a digitally enabled performance, a digital game or toy. The project outcomes should inspire you in your future projects and might be developed further in your final year. 

This module provides you with an understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues that can be applied to the design and evaluation of interactive computer-based systems and other interactive technology. 

You'll explore a range of topics relating to sound, perception, signal processing and music information retrieval:

• Advanced audio and music perception: frequency, pitch, and harmony; melody; rhythm; spatial perception
• Audio signals: sampling, aliasing, quantising, compression
• Fourier analysis and working the frequency domain
• Digital signal processing: signals and systems, linearity and time-invariance, convolution, filters, reverb, EQ, filter design
• Signal processing programming
• Perceptually-motivated features for audio analysis, information retrieval, and recommendation

Topics will be practically explored through a series of lab assignments and a final project in which you'll apply what you have learnt to creative ends.

‘Electroacoustic Composition’ introduces temporal development in composition and explores the analysis and composition of Electroacoustic Music. 

This module will introduce you to Electroacoustic Music. You'll be exposed to historical and contemporary works in the field through class lectures. You'll discuss musical aesthetics and form in seminars, using several strategies and concepts such as diagramming techniques, spectromophology, and auditory scene analysis.

Over the course of the term, you'll analyse a piece of Electroacoustic Music and compose either two medium works or one longer form piece with support in the form of composition tutorials. Topics covered in lectures may include:

• Text-Sound Composition
• Musique Concrete
• Acousmatic Composition
• Soundscape Composition
• Mixed Music
• Experimental Electronic Music.  

In order to succeed in this module, you must be able to work independently with sound editing and sequencing software such as Logic Audio, Pro Tools, Reaper, or Ableton. 

Indicative repertoire: 

• Blackburn, Manuella. (2017) Petites étincelle.
• Francis Dhomant. (2020) Images nomads.
• Halim El-Dabh, Halim. Ta'abir al-Zaar. ‘Halim El-Dabh : Wire Recorder Piece.’ soundart.zone.
• Henry, Pierre and Pierre Schaeffer (2010) Panorama de Musique Concréte. Cherry Red Records. CDHerndon, Holly. (2016) Platform.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. (1964; 2002) Kontakte.
• Spiegel, Laurie. (1980). Appalachian Grove I.
• Pade, Else Marie. (2014) Electronic Works 1958-1995.

This production-centred module will provide you with an introduction to audiovisual composition. You'll explore several theoretical and practical approaches as well as video production software and techniques. You'll learn about the history of visual music and other cultural and historical contexts for audiovisual composition. You'll analyse and discuss pieces of historical significance along with modern examples.

By the end of the module, you'll produce two audiovisual works 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, including other aspects of production such as filming and compression for various distribution formats.

This module will develop the knowledge you acquired in the module ‘Music in Film’. You'll further explore the function of music in relation to other media, through practical composition work. By working with music technology software, you'll be introduced to a number of technical and creative approaches to the composition of music for media, such as:

• Narrative film and TV
• Documentary
• Videogames
• Production music
• Commercials
• Podcasts.

You'll study core concepts, such as the role of synchronisation and illustration, awareness of genre, and how elements combine in multimedia forms. You'll get to grips with practical composition strategies including the use of thematic organisation, temp tracks, orchestration/arrangement/production, and working to instruction on a tight deadline. Theory will be brought to life with case studies from a number of prescribed films and videos.

Elements of business practices and the organisation and logistics of film scoring will be covered in lectures. You'll work towards your final submission of a showreel of three pieces (to film or game) accompanied by a PDF commentary based on a template provided.

Pre-requisite: Music in Film

The co-requisite for this module is Level 2 Music in Film.

Music has long been linked to individual and collective senses of identity. For example, musicologists and journalists have drawn connections between music-making/listening and the formation of identities. In addition, arts policymakers and arts organisations have considered identity and how that relates to music participation and appreciation. By listening to or making certain types of music, we can communicate who we are to others and ourselves. 

In this module, you'll explore how individuals and collectives have presented aspects of identity through and in music performance, participation, description, and appreciation. You'll first engage with fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of identity, and then work on models for describing our own positions and identities in relation to music activity and practice. Using written and recorded materials, we will explore themes of age, gender, ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, and physicality.   

You'll be encouraged to supplement these materials with examples of your own, to be discussed in lectures and seminars. The module draws from theoretical debates in musicology, sociology and cultural studies, and encourages a critical and reflexive approach to questions of identity. 

In this module, you'll focus on the relationship between concepts and making by exploring some of the key concepts in sonic art, and how they continue to engender and stimulate creative practice. You'll explore how we might translate our own concepts into practice and/or scholarly reflections and have a chance to engage with some of the unique sonic art archives held at Goldsmiths, for instance, Longplayer, Daphhe Oram, Lily Greenham, Hugh Davies, Women's Revolutions Per Minute.  

Through lectures, seminars, an archival visit and one-to-one tutorials, you'll examine topics such as:

• Listening and walking practices
• Sound and the environment, site-specificity
• Sound installation
• The politics of sound
• Sound objects and instrument making
• Performativity and liveness
• Durational art.

For the assessment, you'll have the chance to create either a piece of sonic art with an accompanying commentary, or an essay exploring topics discussed in class.

Increasingly, computer systems in research and industry, and particularly the machine learning systems that underpin modern Artificial Intelligence, are designed to leverage large amounts of data.

This data is rich and various and may include anything from the results of clinical trials to information gleaned from analysing millions of tweets to understanding how people talk positively and negatively about politics.

In this module, you'll learn how to develop systems that operate in, and make use of such data-rich environments. This module builds on other material in the programme such as mathematics and databases. 

This module will show you how to work with data in various ways:

• Capturing data from a variety of sources
• Visualising data in compelling, informative ways
• Processing data to make it useful and shareable
• Reasoning with data to test hypotheses and make parameterised predictions

You'll also implement and apply basic machine learning methods. The module will also introduce you to a new language and programming environment that is well-adapted to languages for these applications.

Creative embedded systems and the use of microcontrollers are of increasing interest to artists, musicians, choreographers, and other creative practitioners for the creation of artworks and other forms of novel computational interaction.

There are many potential applications, for example, in museums, ubiquitous and embedded computing, robotics, engineering control systems and human computer interaction. A physical environment may be sonic, tangible, tactile, visually dynamic, olfactory or any combination of these.

This module will provide a starting point for you to develop an understanding of microcontrollers and how they fit into a wider computing and artistic context. You'll learn basic physics, electronics, programming with a strongly typed compiled language, and software engineering.

This module will lead to an extended project, giving you the opportunity to develop and implement new creative ideas utilising computation for creative expression. 

This module covers the basics of working with interactive and generative sound in the context of computer games and immersive experiences.

You will learn how fundamental concepts in sound design and digital audio, such as audio samples, signal generators, mixers and audio effects can be used within a modern game engine to create rich and immersive sonic and/or musical experiences.   

At the end of the module, you will be able to create simple sound-oriented games and interactive experiences and to publish them on different platforms. 

How have people made sense of, and articulated in music, the change and disruption that characterises modern life everywhere? In order to answer that question, you'll concepts of modernism, Afromodernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism in music of all kinds, and in culture more broadly, as they have been developed and employed across the 20th and 21st centuries.

You'll be encouraged to explore the creative and theoretical uses that, in attempting to express the hope and confusion of the tumultuous present, musical modernisms have made of the future and the past, the human and the machine, the present and the virtual.

A series of lectures explores modernisms as they shaped and reflected theory and practice in art, popular and experimental musics since 1900. You'll be supported to think critically and creatively about the claims inherent to those modernisms’ thought and action. In preparing written assignments, you'll beable to focus on historical topics, or discuss the themes studied in contemporary contexts. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups. 

Combining historical, musicological and sociological perspectives, this module focuses on the musics of, within, and circulating across East Asian countries (mainly China [including Taiwan], Japan and South Korea), within the context of debates and theoretical discussions concerning industry, geo-politics, technology, and musical practice, style and form. 

You'll approach East Asia as a distinct transnational production and cultural space. That region is nevertheless fraught with enduring historical tensions, not only internally but also elsewhere, as these countries are located within a further series of outer-national and global relationships across Australasia, Eurasia and the Americas. In broad terms, East Asian music will be explored via debates that engage with such themes as: modernity and tradition; Confucianism, communism and capitalism; Buddhism and Christianity; imperialism (in its many cultural, political, and economic guises); colonial modernity; Asianization; and the long post-colonial period. A number of key moments, musicians, songs, compositions and events will be used to explore the varied dynamics and historical legacies that feed into the creation, circulation and consumption of music. 

You'll develop your ability to critically understand how musics are constituted within, yet also contribute to, specific cultural, political and social circumstances and relationships. The module will enable you to address issues of musical form and practice, and relate this to a range of debates about creativity, style, representation, cultural expression and appropriation. You'll consider the ways in which all musics are shaped by various moral economies and regulatory frameworks. By shifting away from the Western-centric view, the module will increase students’ awareness of the concerns of diversity and the varied experiences of colonisation.  

The module is designed for students with strong research interest in Russian culture and Russian history. The emphasis is on history, and on different aspects of social and political life in Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly on current issues. Much of the module will be devoted specifically to the Soviet period, to the ‘socialist realism’ rules in creative arts. Special lectures/seminars will be devoted to Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Schnittke and post-Soviet composers, in relation to the ‘official’ propaganda in Soviet Union, Stalin decrees and the official line of the Communist Party cultural ‘programme’. Particular attention will be given to the current issues, and the development of Russian music after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Students will be given the opportunity to work at Goldsmiths’ unique archives – Prokofiev, Schnittke archives, Stravinsky Collection, and the special collection of post-Soviet scores and documents.

To take this module you should have: competence in academic writing, with a particular focus on the issues of culture and politics.  Experience in musical score reading would be helpful, but isn’t compulsory for this module..

Why was a celebrity music industry first generated in 18th-century London? The answer, in part, is that Britain led the global trade in enslaved Africans. In this module you'll explore how profits and attitudes derived from the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Paul Gilroy’s term) fuelled commerce in entertainment that eventually embraced artists of African descent. You'll examine historic materials in class through lectures and creative practice workshops.   

Our core text is Polly, a ballad opera of 1728 set in Jamaica which skewered Britain’s profits from the slave trade so effectively that the government banned it. In Polly, author John Gay showed how a large flow of money into Britain worsened inequality – a distortion Gay highlighted by pillorying music’s consumption – put a premium on celebrity, and fuelled the politics of identities sexual, racial, and social.

Our lectures will start with a clear understanding of what present-day scholars mean by the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ’celebrity’, after which we'll delve into the issues Gay raised, and the music he linked to those issues. The commercialisation of popular music, the association of Italian opera with connoisseurship, immoral wealth, and trans*/deviant sexuality, and audience fascination with ‘exotic’ virtuosi like the Haitian-born violinist-composer Joseph Bologne, Chevallier de Saint-Georges, will be topics of lectures and workshops. 

We'll celebrate 18th-century artists’ innovations and unique creative practices, especially in improvisation, which we will explore in workshops. Lectures in the second half of the module will each focus on two contrasting musicians (black/white, straight/queer, child/adult), whom you'll examine within their historical context but also relate to current-day artists. The module may include a field trip to this module’s partner institution the Foundling Museum; if the field trip is not possible, a virtual tour will be provided.  

This same module will be delivered at Levels 5 and 6; you'll have the opportunity to discuss and perform with the third-year cohort as well as your level 5 peer group. ' 

The module will enable you to develop creative and technical strategies for composition. You'll study contemporary techniques, identifying areas such as pitch organisation, rhythm and texture.

You'll undertake a series of creative tasks, exploring with indeterminacy and new forms of notation, pre-compositional strategies (involving graphical representation and text) and other creative disciplines, e.g. the visual arts. 

Techniques in Jazz & Popular Music provides you with an introduction to the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of jazz and commercial music.

You'll study:

• Tonality
• Standard chord progressions
• Chord/scale relationships
• Chord voicings and voiceleading
• Modes
• Extended chords
• Basic reharmonisation.

You'll be instructed in the conventions of jazz and popular music notation, including the presentation of lead sheets and full scores. You'll be taught through lectures and tutorials at the end of the term. 

Co-requisite module: Arranging and Composing for the Jazz Ensemble

When watching a major Hollywood film, we're often so engrossed in the action that we fail to hear the soundtrack that underpins it. And yet this inaudible music can fundamentally change how we read a film. These unheard soundtracks have prompted a debate that has raged for 30 years: is the music there simply to cover up awkward silences in the cinema? Or is it there to disguise editing and temporal jumps in the image? Some have even claimed that soundtrack appeals to our subconscious, causing us to regress into a state more susceptible to the onscreen fantasy.

In this module, you'll explore the phenomenon of film music and the theory that has accompanied it through various genres, and will encourage active engagement in interdisciplinary study. You'll be introduced to a number of perspectives on the use, function and reception of music in (primarily) narrative film. This will include a discussion of practices from the so-called 'silent era' through to contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema; exploration of the distinctions between the deployment of dramatic scoring and pre-existent music; the position of music in film's narrative fabric; and the interaction between music and other elements of film sound. Key concepts and theorists in film music and film sound scholarship will be introduced, and the module will be supported by engagement with significant literature. 

Seminar groups after each lecture will engage in exploratory tasks, and will provide preparation and advice for the main assignment, which requires you to develop a critical and analytical reading of the music and sound in a film of your choice.  

This module will introduce you to a range of techniques and approaches in arranging and composing for jazz ensemble contexts, including knowledge of instrumentation and arrangement for standard brass and reed groupings and incorporation of the string ensemble and voice.

You'll gain an understanding of conventional scoring and voicing techniques, the use of extended harmony, modes and counterpoint, thickened line and chord spreads, as well as various arranging and composition concepts appropriate to Jazz rhythm section, frontline, voice and strings.   

The Sibelius notation program is used as the main music preparation tool. You'll complete a workbook exercise, followed by a second assignment where a complete arrangement for a medium size ensemble is developed in full score from a lead sheet (original composition or extant) and recorded by a department Jazz ensemble as part of your submission.

The module will introduce you to the diverse musical traditions of Africa and Asia. You'll concentrate on traditional musical practices and their transformation in a global context, as well as newly created styles.

You'll be expected to become familiar with various types of music from geographical areas like Southern Africa, West Africa, North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and East Asia.

Engaging with key issues and themes in ethnomusicology, the module will promote an understanding of the underlying structural principles and aesthetics of different musical styles and the social and cultural contexts in which they are performed.

This module teaches techniques of contemporary composition through a varied set of elementary and fundamental technical composition studies. The students take part in both formative as well as summative assessment working to gain a better hands-on understanding of the processes and methods involved in composition. The focuses of this module are:

• Musical Time: the constituent parts of musical time: Rhythm, Tempo, Metre, and Bar.
• Pitch: the generation of pitch structures and how they can be employed in music. Definition(s) of atonality, strategies for atonal, tonal and modal composition.
• Timbre and materials: Range of musical materials, experimental strategies
• Compositional systems and structures: from serialism to minimalism, generative systems, and systematic approaches to larger structure and form.

 This module is a co-requisite for MU52023B Composition: Creative Strategies in Term 2.

The nineteenth century has long been deemed a romantic age, in which music and its listeners became concerned primarily with the transcendental and the otherworldly. But, this was a time in which material things were profoundly altering the ways people wrote, performed and encountered music. In the wake of the industrial revolution, composers from Schubert in his ‘Der Leiermann’ to Smetana in his Mà vlast, found themselves compelled to capture the sounds of modernity or the sounds of landscapes under threat of destruction.

The musicking body, meanwhile, became a site of fascination and heated debate. Critics by turn reeled from and extolled overwhelming noise levels in the opera house, the superhuman feats of such performers as Clara Schumann, and the increasing prominence of non-normative and transgressive bodies on the stage. Amidst all this, the very act of listening was being forever changed by new technologies of illumination, staging, recording and travel.  

Through consulting a variety of primary sources, from scores, letters and reviews to images and early sound recordings, you'll be encouraged to carry out your own research into music-making in the 19th century. You'll come closer to an understanding of how music was experienced in the past. By turning to the material, the bodily and the real, this module not only aims to unravel conventional definitions of romanticism, but to challenge the objects and techniques of musicological study borne out of this movement that linger today. 

In this module, you'll address the aesthetic questions that are of relevance to all musicians: questions of musical beauty, value, meaning, and its experience. You'll consider the history of aesthetics, whilst clarifying these issues by discussing them systematically, carefully analysing the concepts involved and by uncovering the cultural conditions implicated in the construction of individual and cultural values.

Discussion of examples of musics and their properties will inform the approach taken in the lectures, but so too will the complex relationships between music, musicians, society and culture. As a result, you'll explore individual and social conceptions of cultural value and aesthetic experience alongside questions of musical beauty and experience. This will involve the consideration of the culture of art and music, and their institutions, alongside the consideration of music as a discipline of art. In thinking about these types of question, you'll discuss the ideas of philosophers, theorists, musicologists and musicians, in the context of relevant musical case studies. The main aim of the module is not to settle on the ‘right’ answers (they may not exist), but to help you to think in logical and consistent ways about the principles by which they might begin to negotiate and evaluate your experiences in relation to music and to the world.

This module takes its cue from the 1956 Columbia album What is Jazz?, on which Leonard Bernstein – by that time one of America’s most famous musicians and public educators – delivers a lecture on the music’s technical and stylistic features. Blue notes, vocalised instrumental tones, and the transformation of song material through improvisation, all these things are illustrated by Bernstein’s guests across a variety of styles, and the programme ends with Miles Davis and John Coltrane pitching an old pop tune into a supermodern vortex of altered chords and right-angle phrasing.

This, then, was jazz, or at least the part of it that Bernstein called ‘the music itself’. But what would become of jazz later, when many of its musicians discarded those supposedly fundamental techniques, indeed refused the J-word altogether? And what is jazz when considered as a set of both musical and social practices? After all, the music has been taken by its players and listeners as sounding certain worldviews, whether hedonistic or abstruse; it has been imagined as a mode of political action, whether that meant opting out or acting up; it has provided ways of thinking about the individual and the collective, whether in critical metaphor or musical practice. 

In this module, you'll use musical analysis and readings to examine jazz’s developing cultural situation, from its beginnings to the present day. Central considerations are the music’s changing learning, performance and institutional contexts and prestige; its understanding as both an American and a global phenomenon; its functioning as a lens through which to envisage (and distort) ideas of race, gender and sexuality; its visual, verbal and sonic representations of attitude and style. This thematic approach will be complemented by listening and reading tasks which, focusing on specific moments or practices and progressing chronologically, will enrich our understanding of jazz’s historical development.

This part of the module pays homage to jazz’s hallowed names and recordings, but it also encourages students to think critically about the music’s canons. That means extending them stylistically, geographically and longitudinally: arriving at the present, we will think about how some enduring jazz impulse has been seen to animate the music of artists as different as Amy Winehouse and Kendrick Lamar, Esperanza Spalding and Jamie Cullum. 

In this module, you'll explore advanced topics in Music Computing such as generative and reactive compositional systems, machine learning tools, and live electronics.

You'll use a programming language for music computing purposes and explore algorithms to generate musical structure and content. You'll complete several smaller projects while they work towards the production of a concert hall performance for live performer and accompanying software.

You'll explore a range of topics relating to sound, perception, signal processing and music information retrieval:

• Advanced audio and music perception: frequency, pitch, and harmony; melody; rhythm; spatial perception
• Audio signals: sampling, aliasing, quantising, compression
• Fourier analysis and working the frequency domain
• Digital signal processing: signals and systems, linearity and time-invariance, convolution, filters, reverb, EQ, filter design
• Signal processing programming
• Perceptually-motivated features for audio analysis, information retrieval, and recommendation

Topics will be practically explored through a series of lab assignments and a final project in which you'll apply what you have learnt to creative ends.

In this module, you'll explore jazz performance through the lens of contemporary UK practice from the 1980s to the present day. You'll need some experience performing in small Jazz ensembles where improvisation is deployed in shaping the musical material (for example in the department’s Creative Jazz Workshop ensemble).  

Delivered jointly at level 5 and 6 as mixed activity, you'll approach the work of key creative jazz practitioners through analysis and evaluation, supported by your independent research. You'll apply knowledge from these activities practically (to given or related source material) in ensemble performance workshops. Here students at L5 and L6 will combine to form jazz performance ensembles which will vary over the course of the module

As well as considering stylistic musical parameters (groove, harmony, meter, melody, vocabulary, instrumentation etc.) you'll consider issues that have shaped and are currently shaping the UK jazz horizon such as heritage, race and gender. You'll investigate how these issues establish and consolidate the notion of “scene”, allowing you to locate your personal practice in relation to this.

Co-requisite: Techniques in Jazz

This module builds on the knowledge developed in C++ for Creative Practice by introducing you to a variety of specialist topics relevant to creative practice. This will be done through a project developed in weekly stages covering topics such as Networking with OSC, Event-driven programming with lamdas, memory management and smart pointers, developing GUIs, error handling, and test-driven development.

Through this grounded and practical work, students build greater knowledge of C++ syntax and techniques.

This module will introduce you to the process of running an independent research project in Creative Computing. It aims to prepare you for the independence of your final year, self-initiated research project. You'll be provided with direction, structure and a given theme that you'll research and explore through a series of workshops and formative projects, leading to an assessed exhibition and final project report in the style of your final year project. 

Example projects include a software tool for creative work, portfolio of creative studies, an installation, a digitally enabled performance, a digital game or toy. The project outcomes should inspire you in your future projects and might be developed further in your final year. 

This module provides you with an understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues that can be applied to the design and evaluation of interactive computer-based systems and other interactive technology. 

This module introduces a range of techniques and approaches in arranging for jazz and popular music contexts, including knowledge of instrumentation and arrangement for standard brass and reed groupings, and for different sizes of string ensemble. You will gain an understanding of conventional scoring and voicing techniques, the use of extended harmony, modes and counterpoint, thickened line and chord spreads, as well as various arranging concepts. The Sibelius notation program is used as the main music preparation tool. During this module, you will complete a portfolio of preliminary exercises, followed by a principal assignment in adding an ensemble arrangement to an extant rhythm chart. 

You are strongly recommended to take L2 Techniques in Jazz & Popular Music in preparation for this module. 

This module is a pre-requisite for the  L3 Creative Orchestration module. 

Learning outcomes: 

1. Knowledge of the instrumentation commonly used in jazz and commercial music, and the demonstration of its idiomatic use.
2. Ability to control harmony and chord voicing at an advanced level.
3. Ability to demonstrate awareness of standard arranging concepts.
4. Ability to structure and develop an arrangement around a given formal structure.
5. Ability to prepare professional materials (score and parts) suitable for a recording session. 

‘Electroacoustic Composition’ introduces temporal development in composition and explores the analysis and composition of Electroacoustic Music. 

This module will introduce you to Electroacoustic Music. You'll be exposed to historical and contemporary works in the field through class lectures. You'll discuss musical aesthetics and form in seminars, using several strategies and concepts such as diagramming techniques, spectromophology, and auditory scene analysis.

Over the course of the term, you'll analyse a piece of Electroacoustic Music and compose either two medium works or one longer form piece with support in the form of composition tutorials. Topics covered in lectures may include:

• Text-Sound Composition
• Musique Concrete
• Acousmatic Composition
• Soundscape Composition
• Mixed Music
• Experimental Electronic Music.  

In order to succeed in this module, you must be able to work independently with sound editing and sequencing software such as Logic Audio, Pro Tools, Reaper, or Ableton. 

Indicative repertoire: 

• Blackburn, Manuella. (2017) Petites étincelle.
• Francis Dhomant. (2020) Images nomads.
• Halim El-Dabh, Halim. Ta'abir al-Zaar. ‘Halim El-Dabh : Wire Recorder Piece.’ soundart.zone.
• Henry, Pierre and Pierre Schaeffer (2010) Panorama de Musique Concréte. Cherry Red Records. CDHerndon, Holly. (2016) Platform.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. (1964; 2002) Kontakte.
• Spiegel, Laurie. (1980). Appalachian Grove I.
• Pade, Else Marie. (2014) Electronic Works 1958-1995.

This production-centred module will provide you with an introduction to audiovisual composition. You'll explore several theoretical and practical approaches as well as video production software and techniques. You'll learn about the history of visual music and other cultural and historical contexts for audiovisual composition. You'll analyse and discuss pieces of historical significance along with modern examples.

By the end of the module, you'll produce two audiovisual works 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, including other aspects of production such as filming and compression for various distribution formats.

This module will develop the knowledge you acquired in the module ‘Music in Film’. You'll further explore the function of music in relation to other media, through practical composition work. By working with music technology software, you'll be introduced to a number of technical and creative approaches to the composition of music for media, such as:

• Narrative film and TV
• Documentary
• Videogames
• Production music
• Commercials
• Podcasts.

You'll study core concepts, such as the role of synchronisation and illustration, awareness of genre, and how elements combine in multimedia forms. You'll get to grips with practical composition strategies including the use of thematic organisation, temp tracks, orchestration/arrangement/production, and working to instruction on a tight deadline. Theory will be brought to life with case studies from a number of prescribed films and videos.

Elements of business practices and the organisation and logistics of film scoring will be covered in lectures. You'll work towards your final submission of a showreel of three pieces (to film or game) accompanied by a PDF commentary based on a template provided.

Pre-requisite: Music in Film

The co-requisite for this module is Level 2 Music in Film.

Music has long been linked to individual and collective senses of identity. For example, musicologists and journalists have drawn connections between music-making/listening and the formation of identities. In addition, arts policymakers and arts organisations have considered identity and how that relates to music participation and appreciation. By listening to or making certain types of music, we can communicate who we are to others and ourselves. 

In this module, you'll explore how individuals and collectives have presented aspects of identity through and in music performance, participation, description, and appreciation. You'll first engage with fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of identity, and then work on models for describing our own positions and identities in relation to music activity and practice. Using written and recorded materials, we will explore themes of age, gender, ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, and physicality.   

You'll be encouraged to supplement these materials with examples of your own, to be discussed in lectures and seminars. The module draws from theoretical debates in musicology, sociology and cultural studies, and encourages a critical and reflexive approach to questions of identity. 

In this module, you'll focus on the relationship between concepts and making by exploring some of the key concepts in sonic art, and how they continue to engender and stimulate creative practice. You'll explore how we might translate our own concepts into practice and/or scholarly reflections and have a chance to engage with some of the unique sonic art archives held at Goldsmiths, for instance, Longplayer, Daphhe Oram, Lily Greenham, Hugh Davies, Women's Revolutions Per Minute.  

Through lectures, seminars, an archival visit and one-to-one tutorials, you'll examine topics such as:

• Listening and walking practices
• Sound and the environment, site-specificity
• Sound installation
• The politics of sound
• Sound objects and instrument making
• Performativity and liveness
• Durational art.

For the assessment, you'll have the chance to create either a piece of sonic art with an accompanying commentary, or an essay exploring topics discussed in class.

Increasingly, computer systems in research and industry, and particularly the machine learning systems that underpin modern Artificial Intelligence, are designed to leverage large amounts of data.

This data is rich and various and may include anything from the results of clinical trials to information gleaned from analysing millions of tweets to understanding how people talk positively and negatively about politics.

In this module, you'll learn how to develop systems that operate in, and make use of such data-rich environments. This module builds on other material in the programme such as mathematics and databases. 

This module will show you how to work with data in various ways:

• Capturing data from a variety of sources
• Visualising data in compelling, informative ways
• Processing data to make it useful and shareable
• Reasoning with data to test hypotheses and make parameterised predictions

You'll also implement and apply basic machine learning methods. The module will also introduce you to a new language and programming environment that is well-adapted to languages for these applications.

Creative embedded systems and the use of microcontrollers are of increasing interest to artists, musicians, choreographers, and other creative practitioners for the creation of artworks and other forms of novel computational interaction.

There are many potential applications, for example, in museums, ubiquitous and embedded computing, robotics, engineering control systems and human computer interaction. A physical environment may be sonic, tangible, tactile, visually dynamic, olfactory or any combination of these.

This module will provide a starting point for you to develop an understanding of microcontrollers and how they fit into a wider computing and artistic context. You'll learn basic physics, electronics, programming with a strongly typed compiled language, and software engineering.

This module will lead to an extended project, giving you the opportunity to develop and implement new creative ideas utilising computation for creative expression. 

This module covers the basics of working with interactive and generative sound in the context of computer games and immersive experiences.

You will learn how fundamental concepts in sound design and digital audio, such as audio samples, signal generators, mixers and audio effects can be used within a modern game engine to create rich and immersive sonic and/or musical experiences.   

At the end of the module, you will be able to create simple sound-oriented games and interactive experiences and to publish them on different platforms. 

How have people made sense of, and articulated in music, the change and disruption that characterises modern life everywhere? In order to answer that question, you'll concepts of modernism, Afromodernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism in music of all kinds, and in culture more broadly, as they have been developed and employed across the 20th and 21st centuries.

You'll be encouraged to explore the creative and theoretical uses that, in attempting to express the hope and confusion of the tumultuous present, musical modernisms have made of the future and the past, the human and the machine, the present and the virtual.

A series of lectures explores modernisms as they shaped and reflected theory and practice in art, popular and experimental musics since 1900. You'll be supported to think critically and creatively about the claims inherent to those modernisms’ thought and action. In preparing written assignments, you'll beable to focus on historical topics, or discuss the themes studied in contemporary contexts. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups. 

Combining historical, musicological and sociological perspectives, this module focuses on the musics of, within, and circulating across East Asian countries (mainly China [including Taiwan], Japan and South Korea), within the context of debates and theoretical discussions concerning industry, geo-politics, technology, and musical practice, style and form. 

You'll approach East Asia as a distinct transnational production and cultural space. That region is nevertheless fraught with enduring historical tensions, not only internally but also elsewhere, as these countries are located within a further series of outer-national and global relationships across Australasia, Eurasia and the Americas. In broad terms, East Asian music will be explored via debates that engage with such themes as: modernity and tradition; Confucianism, communism and capitalism; Buddhism and Christianity; imperialism (in its many cultural, political, and economic guises); colonial modernity; Asianization; and the long post-colonial period. A number of key moments, musicians, songs, compositions and events will be used to explore the varied dynamics and historical legacies that feed into the creation, circulation and consumption of music. 

You'll develop your ability to critically understand how musics are constituted within, yet also contribute to, specific cultural, political and social circumstances and relationships. The module will enable you to address issues of musical form and practice, and relate this to a range of debates about creativity, style, representation, cultural expression and appropriation. You'll consider the ways in which all musics are shaped by various moral economies and regulatory frameworks. By shifting away from the Western-centric view, the module will increase students’ awareness of the concerns of diversity and the varied experiences of colonisation.  

The module is designed for students with strong research interest in Russian culture and Russian history. The emphasis is on history, and on different aspects of social and political life in Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly on current issues. Much of the module will be devoted specifically to the Soviet period, to the ‘socialist realism’ rules in creative arts. Special lectures/seminars will be devoted to Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Schnittke and post-Soviet composers, in relation to the ‘official’ propaganda in Soviet Union, Stalin decrees and the official line of the Communist Party cultural ‘programme’. Particular attention will be given to the current issues, and the development of Russian music after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Students will be given the opportunity to work at Goldsmiths’ unique archives – Prokofiev, Schnittke archives, Stravinsky Collection, and the special collection of post-Soviet scores and documents.

To take this module you should have: competence in academic writing, with a particular focus on the issues of culture and politics.  Experience in musical score reading would be helpful, but isn’t compulsory for this module..

Why was a celebrity music industry first generated in 18th-century London? The answer, in part, is that Britain led the global trade in enslaved Africans. In this module you'll explore how profits and attitudes derived from the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Paul Gilroy’s term) fuelled commerce in entertainment that eventually embraced artists of African descent. You'll examine historic materials in class through lectures and creative practice workshops.   

Our core text is Polly, a ballad opera of 1728 set in Jamaica which skewered Britain’s profits from the slave trade so effectively that the government banned it. In Polly, author John Gay showed how a large flow of money into Britain worsened inequality – a distortion Gay highlighted by pillorying music’s consumption – put a premium on celebrity, and fuelled the politics of identities sexual, racial, and social.

Our lectures will start with a clear understanding of what present-day scholars mean by the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ’celebrity’, after which we'll delve into the issues Gay raised, and the music he linked to those issues. The commercialisation of popular music, the association of Italian opera with connoisseurship, immoral wealth, and trans*/deviant sexuality, and audience fascination with ‘exotic’ virtuosi like the Haitian-born violinist-composer Joseph Bologne, Chevallier de Saint-Georges, will be topics of lectures and workshops. 

We'll celebrate 18th-century artists’ innovations and unique creative practices, especially in improvisation, which we will explore in workshops. Lectures in the second half of the module will each focus on two contrasting musicians (black/white, straight/queer, child/adult), whom you'll examine within their historical context but also relate to current-day artists. The module may include a field trip to this module’s partner institution the Foundling Museum; if the field trip is not possible, a virtual tour will be provided.  

This same module will be delivered at Levels 5 and 6; you'll have the opportunity to discuss and perform with the third-year cohort as well as your level 5 peer group. ' 

The module will enable you to develop creative and technical strategies for composition. You'll study contemporary techniques, identifying areas such as pitch organisation, rhythm and texture.

You'll undertake a series of creative tasks, exploring with indeterminacy and new forms of notation, pre-compositional strategies (involving graphical representation and text) and other creative disciplines, e.g. the visual arts. 

Techniques in Jazz & Popular Music provides you with an introduction to the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of jazz and commercial music.

You'll study:

• Tonality
• Standard chord progressions
• Chord/scale relationships
• Chord voicings and voiceleading
• Modes
• Extended chords
• Basic reharmonisation.

You'll be instructed in the conventions of jazz and popular music notation, including the presentation of lead sheets and full scores. You'll be taught through lectures and tutorials at the end of the term. 

Co-requisite module: Arranging and Composing for the Jazz Ensemble

When watching a major Hollywood film, we're often so engrossed in the action that we fail to hear the soundtrack that underpins it. And yet this inaudible music can fundamentally change how we read a film. These unheard soundtracks have prompted a debate that has raged for 30 years: is the music there simply to cover up awkward silences in the cinema? Or is it there to disguise editing and temporal jumps in the image? Some have even claimed that soundtrack appeals to our subconscious, causing us to regress into a state more susceptible to the onscreen fantasy.

In this module, you'll explore the phenomenon of film music and the theory that has accompanied it through various genres, and will encourage active engagement in interdisciplinary study. You'll be introduced to a number of perspectives on the use, function and reception of music in (primarily) narrative film. This will include a discussion of practices from the so-called 'silent era' through to contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema; exploration of the distinctions between the deployment of dramatic scoring and pre-existent music; the position of music in film's narrative fabric; and the interaction between music and other elements of film sound. Key concepts and theorists in film music and film sound scholarship will be introduced, and the module will be supported by engagement with significant literature. 

Seminar groups after each lecture will engage in exploratory tasks, and will provide preparation and advice for the main assignment, which requires you to develop a critical and analytical reading of the music and sound in a film of your choice.  

This module will introduce you to a range of techniques and approaches in arranging and composing for jazz ensemble contexts, including knowledge of instrumentation and arrangement for standard brass and reed groupings and incorporation of the string ensemble and voice.

You'll gain an understanding of conventional scoring and voicing techniques, the use of extended harmony, modes and counterpoint, thickened line and chord spreads, as well as various arranging and composition concepts appropriate to Jazz rhythm section, frontline, voice and strings.   

The Sibelius notation program is used as the main music preparation tool. You'll complete a workbook exercise, followed by a second assignment where a complete arrangement for a medium size ensemble is developed in full score from a lead sheet (original composition or extant) and recorded by a department Jazz ensemble as part of your submission.

The module will introduce you to the diverse musical traditions of Africa and Asia. You'll concentrate on traditional musical practices and their transformation in a global context, as well as newly created styles.

You'll be expected to become familiar with various types of music from geographical areas like Southern Africa, West Africa, North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and East Asia.

Engaging with key issues and themes in ethnomusicology, the module will promote an understanding of the underlying structural principles and aesthetics of different musical styles and the social and cultural contexts in which they are performed.

This module teaches techniques of contemporary composition through a varied set of elementary and fundamental technical composition studies. The students take part in both formative as well as summative assessment working to gain a better hands-on understanding of the processes and methods involved in composition. The focuses of this module are:

• Musical Time: the constituent parts of musical time: Rhythm, Tempo, Metre, and Bar.
• Pitch: the generation of pitch structures and how they can be employed in music. Definition(s) of atonality, strategies for atonal, tonal and modal composition.
• Timbre and materials: Range of musical materials, experimental strategies
• Compositional systems and structures: from serialism to minimalism, generative systems, and systematic approaches to larger structure and form.

 This module is a co-requisite for MU52023B Composition: Creative Strategies in Term 2.

The nineteenth century has long been deemed a romantic age, in which music and its listeners became concerned primarily with the transcendental and the otherworldly. But, this was a time in which material things were profoundly altering the ways people wrote, performed and encountered music. In the wake of the industrial revolution, composers from Schubert in his ‘Der Leiermann’ to Smetana in his Mà vlast, found themselves compelled to capture the sounds of modernity or the sounds of landscapes under threat of destruction.

The musicking body, meanwhile, became a site of fascination and heated debate. Critics by turn reeled from and extolled overwhelming noise levels in the opera house, the superhuman feats of such performers as Clara Schumann, and the increasing prominence of non-normative and transgressive bodies on the stage. Amidst all this, the very act of listening was being forever changed by new technologies of illumination, staging, recording and travel.  

Through consulting a variety of primary sources, from scores, letters and reviews to images and early sound recordings, you'll be encouraged to carry out your own research into music-making in the 19th century. You'll come closer to an understanding of how music was experienced in the past. By turning to the material, the bodily and the real, this module not only aims to unravel conventional definitions of romanticism, but to challenge the objects and techniques of musicological study borne out of this movement that linger today. 

In this module, you'll address the aesthetic questions that are of relevance to all musicians: questions of musical beauty, value, meaning, and its experience. You'll consider the history of aesthetics, whilst clarifying these issues by discussing them systematically, carefully analysing the concepts involved and by uncovering the cultural conditions implicated in the construction of individual and cultural values.

Discussion of examples of musics and their properties will inform the approach taken in the lectures, but so too will the complex relationships between music, musicians, society and culture. As a result, you'll explore individual and social conceptions of cultural value and aesthetic experience alongside questions of musical beauty and experience. This will involve the consideration of the culture of art and music, and their institutions, alongside the consideration of music as a discipline of art. In thinking about these types of question, you'll discuss the ideas of philosophers, theorists, musicologists and musicians, in the context of relevant musical case studies. The main aim of the module is not to settle on the ‘right’ answers (they may not exist), but to help you to think in logical and consistent ways about the principles by which they might begin to negotiate and evaluate your experiences in relation to music and to the world.

This module takes its cue from the 1956 Columbia album What is Jazz?, on which Leonard Bernstein – by that time one of America’s most famous musicians and public educators – delivers a lecture on the music’s technical and stylistic features. Blue notes, vocalised instrumental tones, and the transformation of song material through improvisation, all these things are illustrated by Bernstein’s guests across a variety of styles, and the programme ends with Miles Davis and John Coltrane pitching an old pop tune into a supermodern vortex of altered chords and right-angle phrasing.

This, then, was jazz, or at least the part of it that Bernstein called ‘the music itself’. But what would become of jazz later, when many of its musicians discarded those supposedly fundamental techniques, indeed refused the J-word altogether? And what is jazz when considered as a set of both musical and social practices? After all, the music has been taken by its players and listeners as sounding certain worldviews, whether hedonistic or abstruse; it has been imagined as a mode of political action, whether that meant opting out or acting up; it has provided ways of thinking about the individual and the collective, whether in critical metaphor or musical practice. 

In this module, you'll use musical analysis and readings to examine jazz’s developing cultural situation, from its beginnings to the present day. Central considerations are the music’s changing learning, performance and institutional contexts and prestige; its understanding as both an American and a global phenomenon; its functioning as a lens through which to envisage (and distort) ideas of race, gender and sexuality; its visual, verbal and sonic representations of attitude and style. This thematic approach will be complemented by listening and reading tasks which, focusing on specific moments or practices and progressing chronologically, will enrich our understanding of jazz’s historical development.

This part of the module pays homage to jazz’s hallowed names and recordings, but it also encourages students to think critically about the music’s canons. That means extending them stylistically, geographically and longitudinally: arriving at the present, we will think about how some enduring jazz impulse has been seen to animate the music of artists as different as Amy Winehouse and Kendrick Lamar, Esperanza Spalding and Jamie Cullum. 

The final year project is organised into stage 1 and stage 2 modules. The project modules allow you to devise and produce an independent, creative or technical project in music computing, to be evaluated through the lens of either music.   

This module supports ideation, research, scoping and prototyping stages of the project. Stage 1 of the project may include a proposal, project plan, literature review and a presentation of prototype/preliminary compositional work.

Stage 2 may include a final project, showcase event and report.   

The project modules allow you to devise and produce an independent, creative or technical project in music computing, to be evaluated through the lens of either music.

You will be encouraged to develop the project with a specific context or method of presentation in mind – this could be online, a recorded artefact, or a performance (e.g. a Composers' Forum or EMS Concert, an event of the student’s own devising, or any suitable opportunity for presentation outside of Goldsmiths).

You'll be expected to develop both an individual perspective on your chosen topic and a convincing argument for your point of view, informed and supported by relevant primary materials and secondary literature. You may submit analytical or graphic examples, audio or video material (in any standard format), scores, structural diagrams, and software in support of your work. 

The final year project is organised into stage 1 and stage 2 modules. The project modules allow students to devise and produce an independent, creative or technical project in music computing, to be evaluated through the lens of computing.

The stage 1 prototype module supports ideation, research, scoping and prototyping stages of the project.

Stage 1 of the project may include a proposal, project plan, literature review and a presentation of prototype/preliminary compositional work. Stage 2 may include a final project, showcase event and report.   

The project modules allow students to devise and produce an independent, creative or technical project in music computing, to be evaluated through the lens of computing. 

The final project may consist of an extended single piece or portfolio of closely related works. It is an opportunity to explore in depth a particular area of interest and concern, building upon creative and/or technical interests and specialisms developed in Levels 4 and 5.   

You'll identify your own research questions with the advice, agreement and supervision of a specialist member of academic staff. The work will address these questions through a process of investigation, experiment, and application and will be accompanied by a contextualising commentary. There is no set duration for the project but the scope of the research and creative and/or technical work is to be agreed in negotiation with the supervisor.

You'll be expected to develop both an individual perspective on your chosen topic and a convincing argument for your point of view, informed and supported by relevant primary materials and secondary literature. You may submit analytical or graphic examples, audio or video material (in any standard format), scores, structural diagrams, and software in support of your work. 

Advanced Audiovisual Processing aims to enhance your skills and experience in the development of software for the creation and manipulation of sounds and images, both in real and non-real-time.  

The module extends the principles of creative engineering for use in arts, games, and more general interaction scenarios so that you can develop your own projects through the use of computational approaches to audiovisual processing.

Provides a broad overview of topics in securing computer-based resources, especially the information stored on hardware and controlled by software. We explore core concepts of computer security, including attacks and control, and various techniques for the protection of computer-related assets. Covers topics including computer security, attacks and control, elementary cryptography, cryptosystems, security control models, security problems and protection in operating systems, in databases and data mining, and in networks, security management and administration, legal and ethical issues: patents, copyrights and trademarks, and prosecution.

Artificial Intelligence is a broad discipline and includes many ideas and techniques. This module will focus on the latest developments in this rapidly expanding field. The emphasis is on solving real-world problems and building creative applications with state-of-the-art technology.  

Topics will vary, and may include deep learning, generative deep learning, fully and partially observable environments, environments containing other artificial intelligences, deterministic, stochastic and dynamic environments, problem solving as search, inductive, deductive and probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation and learning, philosophical and moral dimensions, challenges for society, possibilities and AI history.

Neural Networks are widely used techniques for modelling and classifying data. They are used in industry for data analysis applications such as image classification, speech analysis and regression tasks.

This module will provide you with specialised theoretical and practical knowledge of a range of Neural Network architectures that are appropriate for data-oriented tasks. This module is complementary to the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence modules in the programme, focusing on the area of neural computation.  

You'll be introduced to the theory and practice of neural computation. You'll learn the principles of neuro-computing with Neural Networks widely used for addressing real-world problems such as regression, pattern recognition and time-series prediction. 

Physical Computing is of increasing interest to artists, musicians, choreographers, and other creative practitioners for the creation of novel artworks and for forms of computational interaction between these objects and people. 

There are many other applications of Physical Computing, for example in museums, ubiquitous and embedded computing, robotics, engineering control systems and Human Computer Interaction. A physical environment may be sonic, tangible, tactile, visually dynamic, olfactory or any combination of these.

The module will provide a starting point for you to build an understanding of microcontrollers, and how they fit into a wider computing and artistic context. It will cover basic physics, electronics, programming, and software engineering; alongside practical knowledge of tools such as laser cutting and 3D printing which are very commonly used in physical computing. This module will culminate in an extended project which will also give you an opportunity to plan a project over time, and make decisions as your project develops.

This module will provide you with an understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues that can be applied to the design and evaluation of interactive computer-based systems and other interactive technology.

The module introduces you to data mining techniques and methods utilised in the process of discovering patterns in data generated in various fields such as business, financial, social, medical etc., that are abundantly available nowadays.

You'll learn practical skills through data mining algorithm implementation, and through conducting knowledge discovery in data with specialised software and libraries. You'll explore the applicability of data mining techniques in areas such as text mining and sentiment analysis, financial applications and credit scoring, prediction modelling in health.

A large amount of data is available in electronic resources, both offline and online. This module will give a broad introduction to techniques for gathering data from electronic sources, such as databases and the internet. It will cover both fundamental ideas and the use of some of the most important currently available tools. The module will also present tools and ideas for more effectively using the internet to communicate, visualise and generate news stories. 

The module will expose you to state-of-the-art techniques, tools, and open questions related to creative uses of data, signal processing, and machine learning. The emphasis will be on developing hands-on skills using these techniques in creative projects, and on exploring the creative potential of these techniques.  

In addition, you'll identify and address ethical, social, legal and professional issues in machine learning, including how they manifest in the industry.

This module gives you the opportunity to learn the basics of creating multi-platform interactive experiences with a modern game engine. 

You'll be grounded in the fundamentals of game engine development with an emphasis towards exploring the potential of game engines for creating interactive or narrative-driven visual experiences.  

At the end of the module, you'll be able to create simple games and interactive experiences and publish them across platforms. 

The impact of computing in the world has become a matter of urgent social and professional concern. This module will empower computing you to engage fully in the legal, social, and ethical issues that arise, and to have agency regarding their participation in the wider changes enabled by computational technologies.

You'll take both a critical and constructive perspective; not shying away from the problems, but focusing on what can be done about them. You'll learn through a combination of class discussions and practical exercises. This module will act as an interface between computing and other disciplines at Goldsmiths which have a relevant perspective on computing, and will make as much use of guest lecturers from on and off campus as possible.

This module builds on the knowledge developed in C++ for Creative Practice by introducing you to a variety of specialist topics relevant to creative practice. This will be done through a project developed in weekly stages covering topics such as Networking with OSC, Event-driven programming with lamdas, memory management and smart pointers, developing GUIs, error handling, and test-driven development.

Through this grounded and practical work, students build greater knowledge of C++ syntax and techniques.

Visualisation is essential for understanding and communicating information, and for making informed decisions based on data. This module takes the view that data visualisation is a core interdisciplinary component of data science. Effective visualisation requires a combination of computational skills, statistical knowledge, an understanding of human visual perception, and a rigorous and creative approach to working with data.

In this module, you'll explore both the practical skills necessary for manipulating and visualising data, as well as the theoretical knowledge essential for making judgements about how to most effectively discover and communicate insights from data.

You'll become familiar with core visualisation tools and techniques within the Python data science ecosystem. You'll establish a critical approach to data visualisation, starting with interrogating how data is collected, continuing throughout each stage of the visualisation process culminating in the communication of information and possible real-world implications. You'll gain practice answering questions with data and build confidence in presenting your findings, ensuring they are trustworthy and valid. You will gain knowledge of the human visual system, which is essential for designing effective visual communication.

Games exist within an ecosystem of interactive and expressive technology. It is important that anyone aiming to work within this industry understands the context within which games exist and the opportunities for using knowledge from other related disciplines.

This module aims to teach you the foundations of game design practice with a particular view of how game design can be influenced by and take advantage of other forms of expression. You'll focus on how literature, comic writing, cinema, architecture, photography and other arts can influence and change the game design process. In this module, game design will be framed as a language and you'll be encouraged to use a broader vocabulary in order to create more interesting game mechanics. You'll also explore emotions and the ways that games are able to empower/evoke a particular kind of emotion.

Throughout the module, you'll be taught how to take a critical approach to playing games and will be encouraged to analyse how mechanics can improve certain feelings. This critical mindset will be paired with practical game design exercises to aid your understanding of the critical approach.

Mobile technology, including smartphones and tablets, has been a significant technology platform in recent times and the mobile app ecosystem is a significant driver of both innovation and employment. Mobile development is, therefore, a critical applied area of computer science. This module will support you in getting started in mobile development, and it builds on material such as databases, networking and web development taught elsewhere in the programme.  

This module aims to give you the fundamental understanding and skills needed to develop mobile applications. By studying this module, you'll learn the principles of effective mobile user interface design and how to design and build user interfaces. You'll learn about data-driven mobile applications, and how you can integrate a mobile application into a data source. You'll explore the mobile development ecosystem and how you can develop, run and test your applications. You'll learn how to work with various sensors available on mobile devices using built-in APIs. The style of the module will be practical, with a focus on developing functioning applications.  A range of topics will be covered including mobile app ecosystems, user interface design for mobile, mobile APIs, working with sensors, integrating cloud and web services, and mobile deployment. 

Pervasive gaming and immersive theatre are two related fields that have enjoyed significant interest and growth over recent years.

This module will provide you with an opportunity to create embodied experiences, ranging from pervasive games, to escape rooms and theatrical installations. As well as consolidating skills learnt in other modules, you'll be taught a range of technical and soft skills necessary for producing large interdisciplinary projects.

Physical Computing is of increasing interest to artists, musicians, choreographers, and other creative practitioners for the creation of novel artworks and for forms of computational interaction between these objects and people. 

There are many other applications of Physical Computing, for example in museums, ubiquitous and embedded computing, robotics, engineering control systems and Human Computer Interaction. A physical environment may be sonic, tangible, tactile, visually dynamic, olfactory or any combination of these.

The module will provide a starting point for you to build an understanding of microcontrollers, and how they fit into a wider computing and artistic context. It will cover basic physics, electronics, programming, and software engineering; alongside practical knowledge of tools such as laser cutting and 3D printing which are very commonly used in physical computing. This module will culminate in an extended project which will also give you an opportunity to plan a project over time, and make decisions as your project develops.

The module will expose you to state-of-the-art techniques, tools, and open questions related to creative uses of data, signal processing, and machine learning. The emphasis will be on developing hands-on skills using these techniques in creative projects, and on exploring the creative potential of these techniques.  

In addition, you'll identify and address ethical, social, legal and professional issues in machine learning, including how they manifest in the industry.

In this module, you'll explore the impact of Soviet politics on music c.1917-75. You'll investigate the often erratic, invariably vague and ever-shifting nature of state interference, from the loose controls of the 1920s to the introduction of Socialist Realism in the 30s, from the demands for patriotic music in the war years to the reassessment of Stalinism during the Thaw. 

The composers at the centre of this module will be Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mosolov, Gubaidulina and Schnittke. Focusing on symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, mass songs and cantatas, you'll examine the ways in which these and other composers negotiated the pursuit of their artistic ideals with pressures to create music suitable for the proletariat. In so doing, you'll consider how it was that the Soviet regime produced some of the most powerful, and some of the most banal, music of the twentieth century. 

You'll be encouraged to engage in broader musicological and historiographical debates about the position of Soviet propaganda music today, and the problems of lingering Cold War biases and mythologies in writings on Soviet music. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups.

Why was a celebrity music industry first generated in 18th-century London? The answer, in part, is that Britain led the global trade in enslaved Africans. In this module you'll explore how profits and attitudes derived from the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Paul Gilroy’s term) fuelled commerce in entertainment that eventually embraced artists of African descent. You'll examine historic materials in class through lectures and creative practice workshops.   

Our core text is Polly, a ballad opera of 1728 set in Jamaica which skewered Britain’s profits from the slave trade so effectively that the government banned it. In Polly, author John Gay showed how a large flow of money into Britain worsened inequality – a distortion Gay highlighted by pillorying music’s consumption – put a premium on celebrity, and fuelled the politics of identities sexual, racial, and social.

Our lectures will start with a clear understanding of what present-day scholars mean by the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ’celebrity’, after which we'll delve into the issues Gay raised, and the music he linked to those issues. The commercialisation of popular music, the association of Italian opera with connoisseurship, immoral wealth, and trans*/deviant sexuality, and audience fascination with ‘exotic’ virtuosi like the Haitian-born violinist-composer Joseph Bologne, Chevallier de Saint-Georges, will be topics of lectures and workshops. 

We'll celebrate 18th-century artists’ innovations and unique creative practices, especially in improvisation, which we will explore in workshops. Lectures in the second half of the module will each focus on two contrasting musicians (black/white, straight/queer, child/adult), whom you'll examine within their historical context but also relate to current-day artists. The module may include a field trip to this module’s partner institution the Foundling Museum; if the field trip is not possible, a virtual tour will be provided.  

This same module will be delivered at Levels 5 and 6; you'll have the opportunity to discuss and perform with the third-year cohort as well as your level 5 peer group. ' 

Acoustic ecology explores the inter-relationship between individuals and communities and all the sounds in the surrounding environment. It can be human-centered or potentially include all sound-emitting and sound-receiving entities in the environment.

In this practice module, you'll critically and artistically explore the main themes of acoustic ecology from different perspectives, with an emphasis on the role of field recording in creatively responding to, documenting and/or commenting on those issues through composition. You'll refer to related fields such as acoustics, bioacoustics, environmental studies and environmental health. A wide range of field recording techniques will be presented, and best fieldcraft will be discussed. Soundwalking will be presented as one of the key methods.

The place of voice in the soundscape and the use of interviewing and voiceovers will be discussed. With guidance from the tutor, students will devise an individual project related to the themes explored in class, making field recordings and working with them, resulting in a composition, together with a commentary that contextualises the work with reference to theoretical considerations and practice.

In this module, you'll explore the creative use of real-time software for improvisation and composition. The principal environment employed will be Max/MSP/Jitter, although other environments are supported and you'll be encouraged to use them in addition to or in place of Max. You'll learn some fundamentals of Max/MSP programming, including real-time audio signal processing and audio analysis.

In this module, you'll be required to design and execute a research project on a musical topic of your choice, and to present your research as either an essay or a practice research portfolio of equivalent length, in a format prescribed within the module.

Research topics must be related in some way to modules you've taken earlier in your degree, and must be approved by the Department. Once approved, you'll be allocated a specialist member of staff to supervise your work.

You'll also be supported by a series of introductory and plenary sessions covering research skills, methodologies and ethics that will be relevant to them no matter their topic or research medium. In addition, two group sessions bring together a small number of students working on similar topics in order to discuss work in progress. Here, guided by their supervisor, you'll have the opportunity to discuss and share questions, problems, solutions and source materials.

You'll apply your existing practical and creative skills to questions of the development of tacit knowledge and epistemic practices in music, deploying composition, performance or technology-based skills to investigate their research questions. You'll be expected to develop both an individual perspective on your chosen topic and a convincing argument for your point of view, informed and supported by relevant primary materials, secondary literature, empirical approaches and/or their own practice. You may submit analytical or graphic examples, audio or video material (in any standard format), scores, or other material in support of your work. 

Historically, music has formed an integral part of many interdisciplinary artistic endeavors, including opera, dance, theatre and film. This module acknowledges these historical relationships and broadens its focus to include post-digital culture in which many creative skills have become comparable and transferable.

You'll explore the rise across the twentieth century of autonomous artists working with a number of media (digital or otherwise), rather than specialising in or being limited to a single field. The module aims to equip you with conceptual and practical approaches to work across disciplines of your choosing in this contemporary creative landscape, reflecting their existing skills and creative interests.

It will further offer conceptual frameworks for approaching, analysing, and critiquing such ways of working, and offer you opportunities for collaboration and explorative ways of co-operative, creative working.

In this module, you'll explore creativity in performance. By engaging with some of the key ideas on improvisation, which range from the highly technical to the purely spiritual, you'll be introduced to the concepts of spontaneous creativity.

Through a series of lectures and workshops, you'll study in many forms from completely free improvisation to creativity housed within more restricted musical parameters.

You can choose to focus on one style of improvisation on which to be assessed.

This module will enable you to develop skills in music performance through practical workshops on a gamelan ensemble from the Sunda region of Indonesia called gamelan degung.

As well as learning traditional gamelan styles and frameworks for variation and improvisation, you'll be encouraged to develop your own musical creativity through devising innovative approaches to ensemble performance, interaction and improvisation. You'll take part in practical workshops through lectures and seminars, which will examine theoretical issues concerning music learning, performance practice and improvisation in various types of Southeast Asian music. These will focus on issues of musical competence and improvisation in order to provide a theoretical and contextual framework for critical reflection on the oral methods of music learning and performance skills developed during the module.

Drawing from developmental psychology, sociology and educational theory, Music Teaching Skills gives you the opportunity to explore theoretical and practical approaches to instrumental/vocal teaching, with a particular focus on how pedagogy can promote inclusivity and social justice in formal and non-formal group and 1-1 contexts.

The module is delivered through a range of methods (lectures, seminars, workshops, students' presentations and tutorials). A core component of the module is the partnership with external local and/or national institutions/organizations, which gives students the opportunity to develop key employability skills through placements alongside experienced practitioners.

In this module, you'll study the standard principles of orchestration and arrangement as found in various forms of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century music. This includes concert composition and orchestral transcription, film scoring, and jazz/popular music studio arranging – drawing from a diversity of source material.

You'll explore the idiomatic use of orchestral instruments and instrumental groups, standard orchestration and orchestral transcription techniques, and offer creative resources for arrangement.

You'll develop the conceptual and analytical tools to ‘reverse engineer’ techniques of orchestration and arrangement in scores and recordings. You'll learn through lectures, online podcasts and slideshows, seminars, and group and individual tutorials.

This production-centred module will provide you with an introduction to audiovisual composition. You'll explore several theoretical and practical approaches as well as video production software and techniques. You'll learn about the history of visual music and other cultural and historical contexts for audiovisual composition. You'll analyse and discuss pieces of historical significance along with modern examples.

By the end of the module, you'll produce two audiovisual works 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, including other aspects of production such as filming and compression for various distribution formats.

In this module, you'll investigate theoretical, practical and social aspects of music practices that push against or move away from a perceived mainstream. You'll study aesthetic and conceptual extremes and experiments; sounds and ideas that complicate notions of genre and may even call into question the boundaries of music as a form; and musical and extra-musical worlds that invite new categorisations.  

Through the lectures, you'll explore the possibilities of musical practices that question established economic, political and artistic/aesthetic structures as factors affecting creative decision-making. These practices may be interrogated as conceptually, artistically or politically driven, or can be discussed as being idiomatically contemporary, socially connected and/or relevant. You'll interrogate terms like 'underground', 'avant-garde', 'alternative', 'DIY', 'independent', which define discourse around these musics. You'll also respond to the themes of the module through creative practice. 

How have people made sense of, and articulated in music, the change and disruption that characterises modern life everywhere? In order to answer that question, you'll concepts of modernism, Afromodernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism in music of all kinds, and in culture more broadly, as they have been developed and employed across the 20th and 21st centuries.

You'll be encouraged to explore the creative and theoretical uses that, in attempting to express the hope and confusion of the tumultuous present, musical modernisms have made of the future and the past, the human and the machine, the present and the virtual.

A series of lectures explores modernisms as they shaped and reflected theory and practice in art, popular and experimental musics since 1900. You'll be supported to think critically and creatively about the claims inherent to those modernisms’ thought and action. In preparing written assignments, you'll beable to focus on historical topics, or discuss the themes studied in contemporary contexts. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups. 

This research-led module gives you the opportunity to work on a specialised area of popular music studies with a specialist in that field. Subject area grounding will be provided throughout, but you will also be asked to engage with the latest research and thinking, and to produce written work that attempts to function at the (sub)discipline’s cutting edge. Module topics may be contemporary or historical, and may centre on musical and/or broader cultural practices. While you will require extensive knowledge of popular music repertoires and discourses developed over the programme’s first two levels, you may also be asked to draw upon work and methodologies from a number of humanities and social sciences disciplines.

You'll explore the ways in which popular music’s proliferation across the globe is both tied to technological advances, yet intricately bound up in specific musical and social histories. You'll learn how practice can be mapped onto migratory patterns, understood in relation to the cultural hegemony of the United States and read through the legacy of colonialism and enduring colonial structures. You'll question how the emergence of new media (such as YouTube, online radio, social media) has affected the international propagation of performance practice, how global capital interacts with subaltern innovations, and appraise whether locality can remain relevant in an increasingly digital age. 

You'll learn to trace transnational performance networks, assess the democratising potential of the internet and engage in complex debates around race, place and belonging. This is achieved through focusing on case studies across a variety of new styles and international interpretations of existing forms. We will ask how drill makes sense in the suburbs of Western Sydney, question why Tanzania has become a beacon for East African rap, and unpack how geographically disparate genres—such as footwork, shangaan electro and gqom—are united through online-offline communities of dancers, MCs and DJs. 

This module will engage you in discussions of compositional approaches and matters of professionalisation that are relevant to composition.   
This module is split into four pathways to help you build on compositional techniques and skills that you developed at level 5. These pathways are:

• Contemporary Classical and Experimental Music (CCE)
• Jazz
• Songwriting
• Electronic Music.

In the second half of this module, you'll put your technical and creative skills into practice. Supported by staff in the Department of Music, you'll be encouraged to develop a portfolio of work with recourse to the department’s ensembles, studio facilities, extracurricular opportunities or using appropriate software depending on the genre and approach.

The module aims to introduce you to a range of musical materials that you can adapt to use in a variety of community contexts. It will also help you to develop your leadership and transmission skills including devising, developing, planning and delivering music workshops to assist participant individuals and groups to effect personal and social growth and change.

You'll take part and have opportunities to lead practical musical workshop activities derived from a wide range of sources as well as share your own ideas for workshops.  You'll gain an increased understanding of the particular contexts of participatory music making including a range of current thinking and issues, such as the decolonisation of music and music education. You'll have the opportunity to reflect on your own skills and develop new ones including teaching, facilitation, delivery, planning and evaluation and encourage a reflective and inclusive mindset. 

You'll cover such topics as:

• Improvisation for musical & clinical outcomes
• Using graphic scores and minimalism
• Soundscapes and soundtracks
• Genre-based musicking
• Facilitating songwriting
• Songs and other vocal work
• Planning
• Evaluation
• Inclusive leadership and group work. 

In this module, you'll investigate the convergence of sonic and visual media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the relationship between artists, composers and filmmakers, consider a wide range of moving image media, from film, television and music video, to the interactive forms of computer games and VJing.

You'll explore the ways in which music and the moving image interact with one another and how these interactions can influence our reception of, and engagement with, and audiovisual work. Of particular interest will be artists who work across genres and transgress disciplinary boundaries. Our explorations will be informed by the most recent critical work on audiovisual media, and we will use the notions of realism, narrative, screen space, immersion and transmedia to inform our thinking about each genre.  

This module will be delivered in conjunction with the Level 7 module of the same title; you'll therefore experience a discussion of these issues with the MA cohort as well as their level 6 peer group.

This module will introduce you to the principles, ethics and practice of participatory music. You'll gain an understanding of the range of ways music can be used for educational, community and therapeutic outcomes and provides them with a knowledge and understanding of workshop and other creative methodologies. You'll explore a range of career possibilities in participatory music, encouraging professional self-reflection and personal skills analysis. You'll gain a practical overview of how music projects can be structured and delivered for the benefit of varied client groups, and may feed into the module ‘Music Workshop Skills’, where you can put your knowledge into practice. The philosophies of creative engagement, musical inclusion, achieving therapeutic outcomes, formal, informal and non-formal learning and decolonisation will be explored. 

Indicative topics for this module will include:

• The history, principles and ethics of participatory music making, music therapy and community music
• National plan for youth music
• The contexts and organisational structures of these musics
• Creative methodologies
• Safeguarding and professional development
• Singing for health and vocal leadership
• Youth music
• Music in healthcare
• Music and refugees
• Music and dementia
• Formal and informal pedagogy
• Disability and breaking down barriers
• Music as therapy.  

In this module, you'll explore jazz performance through the lens of contemporary UK practice from the 1980s to the present day. You'll need some experience performing in small Jazz ensembles where improvisation is deployed in shaping the musical material (for example in the department’s Creative Jazz Workshop ensemble).  

Delivered jointly at level 5 and 6 as mixed activity, you'll approach the work of key creative jazz practitioners through analysis and evaluation, supported by your independent research. You'll apply knowledge from these activities practically (to given or related source material) in ensemble performance workshops. Here students at L5 and L6 will combine to form jazz performance ensembles which will vary over the course of the module

As well as considering stylistic musical parameters (groove, harmony, meter, melody, vocabulary, instrumentation etc.) you'll consider issues that have shaped and are currently shaping the UK jazz horizon such as heritage, race and gender. You'll investigate how these issues establish and consolidate the notion of “scene”, allowing you to locate your personal practice in relation to this.

Co-requisite: Techniques in Jazz

This module aims to provide you with an introduction to the study of music psychology. Lectures will focus on the perception, cognition and neural basis of musical understanding, perception of musical structure and emotions and theories about music’s evolutionary roots.

The scientific methods used in research will be explored in a research participation session and in lectures. The module will introduce you to music psychology. Lectures will focus on four main themes:

• Musical perception and cognition
• Musical cognition and learning
• Musical origins and emotions in music
• Musical creativity.