THTR 263 Intro to Sound Studios
Teaching Philosophy
As a young and energetic instructor, I have been committed to implementing a teaching model that highly integrates theory and practice in my course. Being close to the age of most undergraduates, I fully understand how they feel about various types of classes. I know well that a course with only hard-packed lectures will easily make students feel burnt out, and I also fully understand that if students are doing practices without a solid theoretical foundation, the effect can be extremely limited. Therefore, I have been trying my best to combine these two aspects, such as introducing more intuitive examples in the lectures to make it easier for them to accept the knowledge, and also providing detailed file descriptions in the course practices and projects so that they can fully understand the meaning of each step they do. THTR 263 Introduction to Sound Studios is a course that focuses on practical applications. I aim to teach students all the techniques for using professional sound studio and audio equipment to complete sound projects like music and video sound. And after learning they should master specific skills like sound system design, recording, editing, mixing, etc. The class meetings of this course are mainly based on my lectures and demo operations in the sound studio, accompanied by some lab hours in the music computing lab. And the students are required to complete some exercises and projects corresponding to the knowledge they learned after classes. The practicing parts are linked with the class content of each stage. For example, there are three projects in the semester. The first one is to exercise their ability to use digital audio workstation, the second one is to let them record in sound studio and use MIDI technology to complete original music production, and the third one is to let them complete the whole sound creation process for a video. Each project is closely related to the theoretical parts and demonstrations.
THTR 263 Introduction to Sound Studio showed in the lectures during that time period. By letting them design and practice by themselves independently through these projects, I can greatly strengthen the knowledge I pass on to them in the classes, and also let them realize that they must study all the theories in lectures to have the ability to know how to complete the works. But before letting them do their works on their own, I will also make adequate preparations such as writing detailed instruction files, so that they can refer to the specific steps, and run a mode that allow them book the sound studio and work in there under the supervision of our studio TAs. In this dual-combination mode of learning theory and practice, the students will not only master all the knowledge and skills, but also complete several of their own sound works for use in the portfolio after the course, so for them, this is an interesting courses which also allows them to reap the works they've done. In the evaluation of their works and projects, all the students are required to do presentations on some class meetings to show their works to the whole class. And I mainly use the technical indicators to score rigorously, and for the aesthetics and the art design parts, I mainly combine the peer reviewed score from classmates and also my basic judgments to determine the grades. I strive to ensure that each work can get a fair grade and the class can also provide more constructive feedback. In addition to grade the practice parts and the works, I also set up several quizzes and a final exam to test whether they have achieved theoretical results. And I need to clarify that the essence of grading students in this course is not based on the scores obtained, but whether they are proficient in those professional skills and make relatively high- quality works, so as to creative tangible results for themselves. In general, I’m trying to let the students achieve some practical works as a way to reflect what they've learned, which is more convincing than grades. And hope my students can always find some interesting memories when they look back on their experiences in the sound studio.
THTR 263 Course Syllabus