Sound (Composition and Sonic Art) MA

Explore sound and music at an advanced level, and focus on the areas that interest you most. This course develops your core skills, such as working with instruments and sonic objects, notational strategies, soundscape recording, sound design, spatial audio, sound design, and interactive audio (e.g. for live performance, gaming, VR, immersive environments, and installations).

We put your work and practice at the centre of everything we do, offering you a space to experiment, make new music, and explore your potential. Whether your work is based in notation or in digital audio, well help you develop and expand your skills as a composer or sonic artist and deepen your artistic, professional and academic knowledge.

You'll join a vibrant community of creative artists working in music, sound design, production, and the performing arts. Creative practice thrives at Bath Spa in many forms, allowing you to work on new creative collaborations with other artists including musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and theatre practitioners.

This MA in Composition and Sonic Art caters for those working in a wide variety of styles and approaches, and enables you to develop an individually-tailored portfolio of skills, experience, and artistic practice. By taking this varied approach, you'll be more suited for employment in today's landscape, where many combine traditional roles (such as musician, performer or composer) with technical roles in other media.

What you'll learn

Overview

This composition and sonic art course provides a space to experiment with new ideas. Well support you to develop your creative practice through practical consideration of both your professional and academic skills.

Weekly discussion seminars and workshops allow your personal development to be contextualised amid the work of others. You'll develop and expand your creative, technical and academic skills, commenting critically on your own and others work. We set this against a wider consideration of current music and sonic art, exploring developments in contemporary thought by looking at new work. We also bring in a broad selection of visiting composers and sound artists to talk about their practice and widen your perspective of ways to make work.

You'll have focused time to discuss and develop your own niche interests and technical concerns, as well as explore new directions. The course also provides the breadth necessary, where required, to prepare you for PhD research and beyond.

Careers

As well as developing your work artistically and technically, this MA Sound course equips you with a broad range of intellectual, practical and transferable skills for the wider workplace.

Well help you prepare for a portfolio career built around your creative practice, drawing in other related areas of work. The course aims primarily to develop your practice as a composer or sound artist, as well as supporting the application of these skills in related areas such as teaching, editing, production, performing, and other areas of the creative industries.

Our aim is that when you graduate, you'll have developed core problem-solving, analytical, and critical skills to support you in the ever-evolving music and sound landscape. Our graduates have had a range of successful careers in production, composition, music for film and TV, sound design for moving image and games, sound art, software development, engineering, teaching, and research.

Generally we look for a good honours degree or higher. Often this will be in Music or Music Technology. However, we accept applicants with other degrees where they can demonstrate relevant experience. We make offers based on your previous experience, which may be conditional on completing current courses, or unconditional.