Free online course in sound and audio this summer

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Barry Truax

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3:29 PM (2 hours ago) 3:29 PM
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Following five very successful previous versions of this course, I am offering to mentor another group of participants in a 12-week online course in sound and audio, starting Wednesday May 6 and going to the end of July. There is no fee for participating in this group.
 
We will be systematically going through the Tutorial associated with the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology located on the WSP Database, and covering two modules most weeks, one in acoustics, the other in electroacoustics. We’ll meet once a week on Zoom for 2-1/2 hours to discuss these topics, scheduled for 10:00 am – 12:30 pm PDT on Wednesdays.
 
This course will be useful as professional development to those wanting to teach sound and audio, as well as graduate students and others who would like to broaden their knowledge across multiple disciplines. If anyone wants to take the course for academic credit, they need to set this up at their own institution and I would supervise it.
 
The particular strengths (and challenges) of the Tutorial are the parallel modules in acoustics and electroacoustics that emphasize their often ignored links. I would expect participants to be more experienced in one or the other areas, but this course should allow for imbalances in knowledge to be addressed.
 
The Tutorial and Handbook files can be downloaded by each individual for ease of access, but participants can also use the online version. The preferred browsers are Safari and Firefox (Catalina OS and Chrome also seem to work). Additional software for experimentation will be made available.
 
For those interested who have the time (I estimate you will need a minimum of 6 hours a week for the webinar and individual study if you want to take it all in), apart from whatever time would be spent with the personal listening and studio experiments), please contact me directly at tr...@sfu.ca, if you have any questions or would like to view the Tutorial in advance, which I strongly recommend.
 
For those in the Pacific region and its time zones, Jesse Budel from Australia will likely organize a parallel version of the course this fall. He will present the same course modules with my recorded audio and the same Tutorial material. As a freelance individual, he will need to charge a fee for this service. Those interested should contact him directly at: budel...@gmail.com
 
Here’s some of the feedback from the previous versions of the course:
 
This tutorial has been an absolute pleasure and a joy.  I am really glad I took the plunge.  What a fantastic learning resource to access, explore and return to in the future. It was great to be guided through this by someone so familiar with the material and therefore with experience of areas that might need more explaining or support to comprehend.  I really enjoyed the listening experiments, fun exercises and potted histories.
 
Thank you so much for the amazing webinar course over the past two months. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to participate in the course and access the tutorial resources. They are very valuable and I have learnt a lot from them.
 
 It was amazing to have the opportunity to dig into these topics further, and also to go through some of the studio experiments that I may have missed on the first time around. I love the practical application of the Studio Demos, they so brilliantly incorporate all of the principles of the Acoustic modules in such a way that I was able to understand not only the theoretical concepts, but also how to apply them within a musical context. And thanks, as always, for creating an open, inclusive and welcoming environment for all, I appreciate that so much.
 
It was an amazing experience to be under your tutelage for the past weeks. I learnt more about sound than I ever have in all my years of composing.
 
It has been one of the most revelative courses I’ve ever been to. All the aspects of sound that we have covered are very promising and intriguing — I’ll definitely continue my studies within this area.
 
This contributed massively to new knowledge and updating my composition processes. I'm also using it a lot in my classes of introduction to electronic music. 
 
It was a pleasure to learn information that I did not know, dive deeper into areas of which I had some knowledge - and to get your valuable insights into the field.  (Plus, it was awesome to have all the resources you supplied for further study).  I really enjoyed investigating the composition techniques used by you and others relating to both text/voice and soundscapes - and how it differs from one composer to another.  These modules were perhaps my favorite! All in all, the whole course was a wonderful experience and I would recommend the course to anyone with an interest in the field of sound.
 
It has been a pleasure and a tremendous source of knowledge and inspiration to study the Handbook and to play with the exercises and the sound and video examples, and to track further literature. The weekly pace was just perfect and I am very grateful for your skilled and very human review of key issues and focus on controversial and generative topics and tools.
 
Thank you very much for providing so many multidisciplinary insights, thoughts and examples in the course. I really liked the modules on convolution and microsound/granulation, and the modules on composition in fact made me revalue material I recorded earlier.
 
I was familiar with some of the topics, but I have learned so much more, and gained a much deeper understanding overall. For me, all of the Electroacoustic modules were totally mind-expanding. I haven't had a lot of hands-on experience with recording and processing sound in that way, so it opens up a whole new world and way of thinking about composition. 
 
Your lectures were great and illuminating. The Handbook is so vast that I'm sure I'll be constantly making use of it in the future. Really, it comes out as a labor of love.
 
Barry Truax (tr...@sfu.ca)
Professor Emeritus
Simon Fraser University

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