Welcome to your Sound Design course

Our courses in the Music and Sound area use a structure designed to give students as much flexibility in their learning as possible, as well as covering the basics which everyone needs. The overall structure of the year is probably different to what most people are used to. The first 16 weeks will cover 4 modules, all covering specific areas of content, then there are 2 weeks for assessments to be completed and submitted, then the final weeks of the year are set aside for an individual practical project which you will work on and submit at the end of the year.

Foundation year students

In the first few weeks of your course, you will be introduced to the Sound Design subject area both as an academic discipline and a practical subject. We will be introducing you to the software and skills you will develop over your time at university and starting you on the road to understanding academic research and writing.

BA students

In your first few weeks, you will be looking at some of the core areas of Sound Design including studio practice, working with digital audio workstations, exploring some key theoretical concepts and getting to grips with the relevant areas of business and the law.

Within your first year you will be working in Logic Pro X, Avid Pro Tools and Ableton Live, if you have never used them before (either you use another piece of music software or have never used any music software) then working through some of the online introductions for these will help you start to understand the software before you arrive. Avid Pro Tools has a great channel here, Ableton has one here, and there are numerous third party introductions to Logic Pro like this one here.

Sound on Sound has a Youtube channel, a magazine, and some podcasts, and they consistently produce interesting content that is always useful in keeping you up to date and talking about the tools used right across the industry.

All the specialist equipment you need is available to access at the university, however you will need a pair of headphones to use in the labs and studios. The best design for these is an over-ear design rather than in ear buds – this is for comfort as much as quality reasons. We would recommend as an absolute minimum something like a Sennheiser HD 206 – the range of what is available with headphones is obviously limitless – but these would represent a good basic design which will work well in all situations. When moving between machines it is difficult to rely on Bluetooth, so we would advise that whichever headphones you do use, that they use a cable.

The only other thing you are likely to need is an external hard drive to store your work on. The larger and faster the hard drive is the better – there are lots of good options. You can make it work with a large pen drive, but quite often these are not fast enough to work directly from with large audio projects and a full hard drive is a better option.

Download software

There is a Music and Sound specific Facebook group for students to chat to each other, share their work and share relevant news and stories.

The Students' Union has a wide range of clubs and societies where you can make friends and get involved with various activities and events.

Get involved

The Project block, which covers the last 8 weeks of the year, will include trips, guest lectures and masterclasses. This year students visited a post-production studio in London, and had guest lectures from film and sync composers, freelancers talking about how to get on in the creative industries and many more. We welcome suggestions from students on the type of sessions they want to see in this part of the year.