MUS 116 - Intro to Digital Audio Production

This course is an introductory 100-level studio course to acclimate students to the technical foundations and key concepts in digital audio production and realizing music in the studio: microphone types, acoustics, digital editing, mixing, mastering, MIDI orchestration, sampling, MIDI mapping, and routing audio. Digital audio workstations (colloquially abbreviated as “DAWs”) softwares will be tools used for creating music. Students will complete a series of creative assignments that will explore timbre, structure, density, and other aesthetic aspects of capturing music in the DAW to establish technical proficiency, and set the technical foundation needed and required for subsequent upper-level creative music electives in time-based music. Listening and reading assignments will cover key cultural moments and practices that have been linked to specific technologies. Collaborative projects and peer review will push students to consider how to record styles of music outside of their own personal interests.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Studio
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Enrollment limited to 15.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).