Music Technology - Minor
Beyond clean audio editing and using off-the-shelf products in conventional ways, the minor in music technology guides students in exploring novel approaches to musical expression through technology-based live performance, fixed media art, installation art, and interdisciplinary creative work.
Required courses provide a broad range of experiences in composing with sound, digital audio editing and signal processing, recording techniques, and merging music with other disciplines in novel and thought-provoking ways. Electives leverage our faculty’s particular strengths and areas of research toward helping students discover and develop their own unique approaches to making technology-based music. Such topics include analog circuitry, analog equipment, digital and hybrid musical instrument building, making music by programming a computer, artificial intelligence, synthesis techniques, musical structures, interactivity, generative (or algorithmic) music, feedback systems, live coding, and more than a century of historical developments.
Throughout the minor, students will build a portfolio of creative work demonstrating their experience and unique voices as twenty-first century musicians ready to make the most creative use of emerging technologies. With this focus on thinking about music and sound in new ways, students will gain skills that apply to conventional work in audio editing, recording, live sound reinforcement, and sound design but will be able to approach these activities with the artistic sensibility of a musician.