MA Music Production and Audio Cultures

Whether you are a self-taught artist-producer who wants to make better recordings, or a trained recording engineer who wants to learn advanced techniques, this course will provide you with the critical thinking, listening and practical skills to realise your goals.
The MA Music Production & Audio Cultures programme aims to teach critical listening and studio practices for musical recordings based on creative uses of technologies ranging from various digital audio workstations through to tape machines, analogue console desks, and 3D audio systems. Informed by research from multidisciplinary perspectives (acoustics, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology and sociology, engineering, feminist and queer theories, and musicology of production), this programme is designed both to convey the scientific principles behind sound reproduction and engage the new generation of music producers and sound engineers in a critical dialogue on audio cultures and the pressing needs to de-gender and decolonise the field. In this way, the evolution of aesthetics and genres are presented through economic, historical, and political lenses, empowering students to follow their artistic vision and to find their own voice in the global music industry.
The programme offers a balance of theoretical lectures, listening seminars, and guided studio workshops taught by industry professionals and scholars. Students complete their productions in the well-equipped performance and recording facilities of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies. Moreover, they have opportunities to contribute to group projects with non-academic partners to gain experiential knowledge in real-life settings and to expand their professional network. Our research-enriched pedagogy enables our graduates to apply a wide range of specialist practical skills, detailed knowledge, and informed judgement to studio-based tasks and other associated music production activities such as live engineering. The interdisciplinary approach of the programme also opens doors for them to pursue a career in education, business and management, and research and development.