Sound Arts (Hons) University of the Arts London (UAL)

Overview

The Sound Arts (Hons) BA course from the University of the Arts London (UAL), students and staff explore the many possibilities of sound arts in a well-established and future-facing program of student-centred activity.

The course covers the diverse ways that sound is used creatively in the contemporary world and you are taught how to apply your creativity to produce original pieces of work in wide range of artistic areas.

The course is accordingly broad, including: fine art, sound studies, art installations and gallery practice, audio-visual communication, game environments and virtual reality, community projects, creative coding, soundscape pieces, interactive work and new media, experimental musical work of all genres and more.

As students on the course you will come from a variety of backgrounds and have a wide range of interests in all things sonic. You will be curious and open-minded and want to develop and expand your potential as a creative artist/practitioner.

Your creative, contextual and technical knowledge will be built throughout the course, allowing you to face the challenges and opportunities of the contemporary creative sound practitioner.

What can you expect?

You can expect this course to take you on an exploration of sound art and design as a constantly emerging culture to be found in many forms and international contexts, in which your own analysis and evaluation will be central.

You will mature and expand your potential in a personal journey through a range of areas including:  

• Creative practice and production
• Sound studies – thinking, doing and being in sound
• Fine art approaches to sound: e.g. sound installations, sound sculpture
• Studio recording, mixing and mastering
• Surround sound (games, Virtual Reality (VR), music, installation)
• Workflows of pre-production, production and post-production
• Field recording and phonography (including ambisonics)
• Hardware fabrication and object / interface design

Your increasing technical, creative and theoretical knowledge will support you in the development of a professional portfolio. You will produce this work within a context of the history, practices and concerns of the sonic arts and of the major theoretical, philosophical and aesthetic issues in the media arts.

Our classes are relatively intimate (20 to 30 students) – this enables us to provide flexible, personal content and orientate our delivery according to the emergent requests of our individual students.

Career opportunities:

The field of sound arts is diverse and growing discipline. Some recent graduates have gone on to postgraduate study; others have found work in music studios or as sound designers and composers for television.

Some become freelance sound designers; others work as sound specialists on professional film and video projects. Some have pursued careers in sound art and installation; others are pursuing performance-based opportunities.

Graduates have gone on to work in diverse areas including film sound, theatre sound design and solo performance work. Some are pursuing careers as independent sound artists, play and perform at venues in London or on the radio, while others have set up their own companies or gone on to study at postgraduate level.