Proposal for Two Core Audio Production Courses

My design for these two core courses would be largely influenced by what I see as two prevalent directions in audio art today: studio-based production and post production work; and, "post studio", context-driven, real time audio work. The first direction, studio-based audio production, includes a vast amount work being done in both commercial and artistic realms. This first direction typically has an inherent lag time between production and distribution or presentation of the work.  The second direction, context-driven, real time audio work, is often times generated and experienced simultaneously at multiple nodes in the highly networked, interactive realms of the Internet, or what Stephen Johnson regards as “interface culture”. Unlike studio-based audio work, context driven, real time audio work has little or no lag time between production, distribution and the listening experience. This second direction, I think, is more prevalent in most students/artists daily interfacings with the culture at large, and thus has the potential to be directly linked to their daily lives in their physical and virtual communities.

A second influence on my design for these two core courses would be the necessity to teach fundamental audio production skills for students working across a wide range of time-based media. While attending to this necessity, it would also be necessary to engage students in the process of making meaningful work and acquiring a working knowledge of audio art's history. Ideally, the two courses would work best if they were sequenced so that there would be a carryover of technical skills, disciplined work habits, developed data banks and personal archives, analytical and critical thinking skills, and the working knowledge of the conceptual and historical development of audio art.

Audio art produced in and out of the studio is equally viable and can have use value to students working in a wide range of mediums. Therefore, the curriculum design challenge of these two core courses would be to present practical and theoretical connections between these two prevailing modes of production and presentation. Teaching the technical and conceptual aspects of these two modes would provide students with a solid foundation for producing quality audio while at the same time