The four-year Bachelor of Music in Sonology offers a unique collection of subjects in which the technical aspects of electroacoustic music as well as the artistic areas where these techniques are applied are covered extensively. All lessons are conducted in the English language.
Courses are given in digital signal processing, writing and using computer applications, analogue studio techniques, algorithmic composition, live electronic music, the relations beween sound and space, experimental sound projection techniques, field recording, improvisation, sound re-enforcement, music theory and education.
Next to the group lessons, there is more and more space for individual projects in subsequent years of the study programme. These projects can focus on technical or artistic subjects. The results of the studies are presented on a regular basis during concerts that are professionally produced and take place in the halls of the conservatoire.
Graduated Sonology students find their ways as independent musicians/artists or are supportingly active in the fields of multimedia, sound design, live electronic music, sound engineering and education. Do you have a passion for technique as well as art music? Are you looking for an artistic environment to further develop your talents and skills? Then apply for the Bachelor of Music in Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire!
For a detailed curriculum overview and a curriculum handbook, please visit the Royal Conservatoire’s page about the Bachelor of Music in Sonology here:
https://www.koncon.nl/en/programmes/bachelor/sonology/bachelor-sonology/curriculum-courses#content
Subjects
Analysis/Re-synthesis and Physical Models — Peter Pabon (BMus3, BMus4)
The central topic of this course is the liaison that perception has with the spectral and physical representations of a sound. A sound can be analysed and exactly resynthesised from its spectrum with the so-called Fourier Model, which presents a series of interesting and characteristic processing options. The sound qualities that come out of this model do not necessarily represent the familiar physicality that perception expects from acoustical sounds. The predisposition of perception to listen for those acoustical markers that define a sound production mechanism triggered an interest in a different synthesis technique called Physical Modelling. Here, vibrating masses coupled together by springs that undergo frictional forces are the modelled abstractions, which can be implemented in real-time too.
Aural Tectonics — Raviv Ganchrow (BMus3)
Every location and the related modes of listening already constitute a sonic context. Aural Tectonics explores the site-specificity and context-dependency of sound by fostering a critical awareness of and attitude towards environmental ambiance. Founded in a practice-based approach, the course develops site-dependent strategies for listening, recording, mapping, synthesis and intervention over a range of spatial typologies, from outdoor public space to electroacoustic environments. The course is structured around a sequence of intensive projects promoting the development of locational modes of listening and personal approaches towards contextual ambiance.
Composing in the Analogue Studio — Yannis Patoukas (BMus1)
The students begin by working on an assignment around analogue sound transformation. Sequences of recorded sounds become the input for transformations such as transposition, inversion, layering, filtering, reverberation, echo, amplitude-modulation, ring-modulation and combinations of these. The results of these experiments are combined in a small composition. For the second assignment, the sequences of recorded sounds are replaced with the three main electronic music ingredients of the Cologne studio in the 1950’s: sine waves, noises and impulses. Techniques are explained in relation to historical examples by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Studie II, Kontakte), Gottfried Michael Koenig (Klangfiguren II, Terminus) and György Ligeti (Pièce électronique no.3, Artikulation). The growing complexity of electronic music production led to automation techniques such as voltage control. As a result, there was a shift in the attention of composers working in analogue studios: where previously they had designed an abstract score that was filled in with a montage of electronic sound material, they now designed a configuration of which the result was not only a sound but at the same time a structure that unfolds in time. The possibilities of Sonology’s modular voltage control system are explored while working on the third assignment.
Digital Studio Introduction — Johan van Kreij (BMus1)
The basic tools for contemporary electroacoustic music production are a computer, a digital mixing desk and multiple loudspeakers. This course provides an introduction to working with a digital mixing desk and a number of standard sound production computer programs. Typical practices in a digital studio are explained, such as music production, recording and live performance.
Educational Skills — Irene Ruipérez Canales (BMus2, BMus3)
Leading workshops alongside your creative practice in sonology is a great way to share your skills with others, to explore your field, discover new innovations in technology and education, and also earn some additional income. In this course we explore new learning environments and then design and develop our own very diverse and unique workshop and teaching practices. Essentially interdisciplinary, creative workshop design is developed through the study of stimulating and innovative models, with opportunities for designing and producing workshops in the real world. These courses offer personalised workshop project development, practical experience and mentoring to facilitate the capacity for enterprise, initiative and creativity.
History of Contemporary Music Composition — Gabriel Paiuk and guests (BMus2)
This course gives the student a chance to explore in detail many of the main currents and counter-currents of thought and practice in composed music since the Second World War. We will discuss the aesthetics, the compositional techniques and the career histories of many of the most influential artists who came to prominence in these decades. The ways in which western compositional traditions have enriched themselves through encounters with other art forms, non-traditional notations, and with jazz, various forms of popular music, electronic music and the music of other traditions, will be important themes throughout. We will look at the writing and the scores of a range of significant creative musicians from the late 1940s to the present and listen closely to recordings of their work.
Introduction to Electronics — Lex van den Broek (BMus1)
This is a workshop-style course, during which students work on three practical electronic measurements as an introduction to basic electronics. They will encounter terms like current, voltage, phase, frequency, amplitude, gain and different waveforms (i.e. sinewave, squarewave, sawtooth). The basics of assembling one’s own circuit and the use of an oscilloscope, multi-meter and function generator will be explained. The students will work together in small groups during three sessions.
Live Electronic Music — Johan van Kreij (BMus3)
The aim of this course is to put improvisation with electronic musicians and traditional instrumentalists into practice. Various kinds of improvisation are analysed, and the ways that electronic processes have influenced thoughts about improvisation are discussed. At some point, the group will be split up into smaller improvising groups. A final presentation will be organised in the form of a concert at the end of the course.
Music Analysis & Mixed-media Composition — Gabriel Paiuk (BMus3)
The main goal of this course is to expose and familiarise you with diverse approaches to the structuring of a music/sound composition, taking as a fundamental basis the analysis of significant landmarks of 20th-century music. The intended outcome of this analytical work is to arrive at an awareness of the essential link between procedures, components and compositional strategies, and a resulting musical form. This awareness is as well fostered through your own practice, within which you are guided towards the realisation of a musical work that articulates micro and macro levels of organisation. Works and strategies of composers like Anton Webern, György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and Mathias Spahlinger, among others, are dealt with. The dialogue and interaction between the worlds of instrumental music and electronic sound production are encouraged and explored.
Music Cognition – Rebecca Schaefer (BMus3)
This course offers an accessible introduction and overview of the multidisciplinary topic of music cognition, which deals with the perceptual and cognitive bases of performing, composing, and listening to music. Covered topics will include perceptual mechanisms underlying pitch and rhythm perception; interactions of musical processing with emotion, language, memory and movement; music acquisition processes and expertise; brain processes related to music and applications of music in health settings.
Musical Controllers Workshop: Design & Realisation — Johan van Kreij and Lex van den Broek (BMus2)
This course describes various ways of working with sensors and how signals from such sensors can be interpreted and used. It also covers insights into the necessary electronic components and the software related to musical control. A number of conversion methods (from sensor output into digital representation) are introduced, as well as the applicable data communication protocols. Before a computer-sensor setup can be taken on stage, some ideas about performative aspects will be developed. The final product of this workshop is a self-built musical controller.
Scores & Archives in Electroacoustic Composition – Anne La Berge (BMus4)
You will work on creating scores of your work, by looking at ones that have been used in electroacoustic performances by composers from the 20th century through today. Scores include pen and pencil on paper, graphic design, physical objects, images, video, Apps, commercial notation programs, and computer programs. Composers include Pauline Oliveros and Natasha Barrett to Alexander Schubert. You will look at the use of narratives, games, timelines, improvisation and fixed media as communication tools and as archiving tools.
New Arts & Music Theories — David Dramm, Erik Kluitenberg, Gabriel Paiuk and guests (BMus1)
This course is offered to all first-year students of ArtScience, Composition and Sonology. It provides a cross-disciplinary exploration of recent ideas, practices and techniques in music and related arts: verbal, visual, theatrical, and much else. New forms of creative practice and new platforms for its presentation are investigated, ranging from the conventional concert hall to the alternative spaces of galleries, installations, site-specific composition, the internet, etc. The relationship and the “fit” between new forms of thought and new forms of presentation will be a recurring topic throughout the course, as will the challenge of writing about such new media in the face of an evolving and still-developing critical language that attempts to avoid irrelevant criteria from past art forms.
Preparation for Final Presentations – Ji Youn Kang (BMus4)
As part of their final presentations, Sonology fourth-year bachelor’s students work on individual projects and a written thesis (see Specialisation Composition/Performance/Research). In the second semester, they give a presentation during the weekly Colloquium (see Colloquium Presentation). The artistic content is supervised by a mentor, and the third year of the programme offers a Writing Skills course.
During the lessons Preparation Final Presentation, however, we primarily discuss the format in which the content of the thesis and artistic work will be presented. What is the supposed foreknowledge of your audience, and how do you place your subject(s) in a perspective in such a way that your argument is clear? How do you look at the content of your presentation from the outside? How do you participate in a discussion without becoming defensive?
Each student will give two 30-minute trial presentations: one in which the focus is on an artistic work, and one in which some research aspects are presented.
Preparation for Individual Projects – Ji Youn Kang and alumni (BMus1)
At the end of each year, you are expected to present the results of your individual project (see Specialisation Composition/Performance/Research). This course has been developed to fully prepare you for what is expected (e.g. content, format), and to make sure that your individual project is integrated in your weekly work schedule.
Programming & Music 1 and 2 — Bjarni Gunnarsson (BMus1, BMus2)
This course covers programming fundamentals, algorithmic composition and programming sound. Students will learn the basics of programming with both object-oriented and functional programming techniques. Applications will be created using various tools for both low-level sound synthesis and higher-level musical systems. The history and development of algorithmic composition will be discussed as well as more recent topics such as live coding, microsound and sonification.
Real-time Processes with Max — Johan van Kreij (BMus1)
Max is a programming tool that is relatively easy to learn, and it is especially suitable for creating and exploring real-time generative processes and the interaction with them. In Max, such processes can be defined as data streams or as audio generating structures. The aim is to research musicality in the interaction, and to define personal approaches and methods. The course starts with a brief introduction to the basics of Max.
Richard Barrett Lectures (BMus1–BMus4)
The lectures form a comprehensive individual view of a variety of interconnected issues of musical composition: the evolutionary origins of music and their implications for thinking about compositional parameters, the nature and scope of musical structures, improvisation as a method of composition, relationships and combinations between acoustic and electronic music on both conceptual and practical levels, and so on, illustrated with examples from a wide historical and geographical range as well as from Richard Barrett’s own ideas as expressed through his work as composer and performer.
Signals & Systems 1 and 2 — Peter Pabon (BMus1, BMus2)
These classes are designed to provide a solid background for dealing practically with the physical and mathematical representations of sound signals and sound processing systems. The course treats standard topics like the decibel, sampling, fundamental periodicity and the build-up of acoustical wave fields. By the end of the first year, student will have an in-depth understanding of the Fourier Transform. In part 2, attention shifts to system characterisation and the concepts of filtering, convolution, impulse response measurement, nonlinear systems and modulation techniques.
Sonology Colloquium — (BMus1–BMus4)
Throughout the academic year, a two-hour weekly colloquium takes place. Ten of these take the form of presentations by faculty and guest speakers, and the rest are presentations by each student from the fourth year of the Sonology bachelor’s programme and both the first and second years of the Sonology master’s programme. During the colloquium, students present aspects of their research projects. The colloquia are attended by four or five Sonology faculty members, by students from the bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes, and the one-year course in sonology.
Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble — Richard Barrett
The Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble (SEE) consists of an alternating line-up of between five and fifteen performers of both acoustic instruments/voices and live electronics, most of whom are students at the Institute of Sonology, although the SEE is also open to musicians from throughout the Conservatoire, and indeed outside it. The ensemble has also given workshops and performances with guest musicians including Paul Obermayer, Evan Parker, Peter Evans, Marie Guilleray and Sarah Nicolls. Its work is based on a structural-compositional approach to freely improvised music, bringing together players/composers from diverse stylistic backgrounds to create a composite personality which is recreated in a novel way for each performance. SEE appears regularly at Sonology concerts and other events at the Conservatoire, and in June 2014 performed three times in Amsterdam as part of the Holland Festival.
Sound & Space — Raviv Ganchrow (BMus4)
Sound and Space is a seminar exploring interconnections between modes of sonic attention and concepts of space. The seminar is grouped around the themes of echo, resonance and oscillation, providing a cross-disciplinary reading of developments in spatial composition, sound art, audio technologies and architectural acoustics. The course covers examples from a broad range of sources serving to highlight distinctive correlations between epistemologies of sound and ontologies of space and place.
Sound Engineering in Electronic Music 1 and 2 — Marko Uzunovski and Paul Jeukendrup (BMus2, BMus3)
The programme covers the fundamental principles of sound design in theory and practice, subdivided into the categories output (loudspeakers), input (microphones) and processing (mixer and peripheral equipment), as well as a frequency ear-training course. Students are responsible for preparing and implementing the Sonology Discussion Concerts, which take place four times a year, under the teacher’s guidance. This includes the preparations for sound amplified performances, communication and technical lists. Each concert involves classical preparation, preparation at home and two days of preparation in the concert hall, including sound checks and rehearsals. The performance closes after the second day, after which there is a group evaluation.
Sound Installations — Justin Bennett (BMus2)
In a sound installation the mobility and freedom of the listener requires approaches to temporal and spatial structures that are different to those of concert music. Through a series of lectures and practical workshops, the course looks at many examples from music, visual art, sound sculpture, (interactive) media art and audio-walks. The students are encouraged to experiment with mechanical, acoustic and electronic techniques for producing sound as well as different strategies for sound spatialisation. The students develop and present a group project.
Spatial Composition with WFS – Ji Youn Kang
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is a sound–production technique designed specifically for spatial audio rendering. Virtual acoustic environments are synthesized using a large number of small loudspeakers. The innovation of this technique is that sound can appear to emanate from desired virtual starting points, and then move through the space along many possible pathways.
This course deals with the technical practicalities of using the system, as well as help with finding and realising artistic ideas for spatial composition through deeper discussions and listening and analysis sessions, and gives students the opportunity to develop their own project over the year with close coaching and consultation, and then to present the results at the end of the year in a small festival.
Specialisation Composition/Performance/Research (BMus1–BMus4)
In addition to the classical lessons, students work on an individual project, under the guidance of a mentor with whom he or she has regular meetings. The project can consist of personal compositions, sound experiments, sound design, sound installations, personally built electronic musical instruments, (partially) self-written computer programs or a report of a study. In the fourth year the project is presented to and discussed with the other students during the Sonology Colloquium. During the fourth year the students also write a thesis, the subject of which may be connected with the project but need not be. The results of the project and the thesis are presented and evaluated during the end-of-year and final exams.
Voltage Control Techniques – KeesTazelaar
The methods used in the Institute of Sonology’s analogue studio are inseparably linked to a serial approach to composition. Whereas with serially composed instrumental music the musical dimensions such as pitch, duration and dynamics are treated as separate parameters, with serial electronic music the sound is also broken down according to various parameters. While that is a fairly abstract phenomenon in computer music, in an analogue studio the parameters of sound structures are visible and tangible: the individual ‘modules’ of the analogue system have specific functions that are combined into a greater whole by means of control voltage. The links between the modules are not programmed but created physically with cables on a patch board. The planning and analysis of such configurations is the main subject of the lessons in the analogue studio.
Writing Skills — Thomas Aldrich (BMus3)
This course gives students the opportunity to practice and to improve their written and oral presentation skills in English. Through a combination of lectures and seminar sessions we will attempt to perfect the student’s ability in written English (for both native and non-native speakers), from detailed questions of grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation and proof reading, to larger questions of style, form and flow in written texts. The course also provides an opportunity to develop the ability to present ideas orally, in the form of small-scale presentations to the group, when we will explore the resources of the reading voice and the effective use of non-verbal materials in oral presentations.