Award: Master of Fine Art, University of Chichester
Video games are evolving rapidly both technically and creatively, and this is creating enormous opportunities for game audio professionals. Our master’s degree in Game Music and Audio has been developed in close consultation with the industry to ensure you are learning the skills the industry requires.
The MFA course is an advanced degree and prepares you for a career as both a video game composer and as a game sound designer, the kind of full-stack game audio professional that is increasingly in demand. Scoring video games is rewarding and challenging but highly competitive. Our real-world project based approach, tutored by working professional game composers and sound designers, is designed to help you compete at the highest level. Being able to provide a complete audio service makes you much more employable.
The course will help you develop as a video games composer, raising your music to a new level, helping you find a voice and distinctive style of your own. You’ll also be going further and learning the technology and creative skills required to work as a video games sound designer, creating immersive audio worlds.
You will work on a inspiring range of games, including commercial releases, provided as part of your course materials. You will learn not only how to create inspiring interactive music and sound, but also how to implement your audio inside the game using industry standard middleware like FMOD and WWise.
Degree courses in game audio are few and far between. This is currently the only master’s degree in game audio and composition available entirely online. Whether you want to learn to compose for video games or are looking for a video game sound design course, our MFA will bring you real-world professional tuition you need to lay the solid foundations of a career in video game music and audio.
Course Highlights
- Personal 1-to-1 tuition from top professional composers and sound designers.
- Work on over 30 real-world projects. The workload is challenging but it’s only through hard work that you will truly reach the next level.
- Detailed feedback from working professionals, online workshops and tutorial groups, forum discussions and exclusive webinars.
- Unique programme developing key, industry facing skill sets, to prepare you for a career as a composer and/or sound designer for video games.
Fees
All of our postgraduate courses have a flat fee, regardless of whether you are full or part time.
Course: £6,875 / $10,050 / €8,995 (per year for two years)
Fees can be paid as one upfront cost, or as instalments spread monthly across the duration of the course.
Students are required to buy, rent or access additional books, scores, recordings, films and other reference material.
Time Commitment
In the UK, an MFA involves 240 academic credits and each credit represents a notional 10 hours of work..
For Game Music and Audio students there are 34 projects including a longer Major Project at the end of the course.
Practice based creative degrees are notoriously difficult to quantify in terms of how long they take to complete. It depends to a large extent, on how fast you write music. Some students write 5 minutes of music a day while others write 5 minutes a week or less. If you work reasonably productively, i.e. 2-3 minutes a day, which is probably average in the professional working industry, you would complete the work in much less time.
A well organized person, working productively, might be able to complete the course in two or three days a week whereas another working slower, might take 5 days a week. Assume therefore that the full-time lies somewhere between 2 and 5 days a week depending on your work rate. Part time would be pro-rata so a three year schedule would be 1-2 days a week.
The Provisional Schedule
Both full-time and part-time students join the same course. Full time students will compete their taught modules by the end of the 20th month. The rest of the year is spent on their major project. Part time students will do their modules in roughly twice the time.
To encourage a sense of “togetherness”, most of the group activities are not locked into particular modules. Guest lecturers, webinars, workshops and solo live sessions will be scheduled regularly throughout the year and are free for all to attend. The individual module work is normally more focused on individual or small group tuition and so is more flexible in terms of timing.
Application
When you are sure you are ready to apply for the programme, go to the course page and click the “apply now” button. This will take you to our store where you can pay the non-returnable application fee of £50 / €70 / $90.
Once your payment has been processed, you will be able to login and complete the application pack.
We will need your personal details, details of your academic, musical and technical background. If you are offered a place, we will require copies of a number of documents including those confirming your academic history, identity and language ability where English is not your first language.
You will also be required to send us some music.
For full details on the application procedure, please visit our website below.
Visit the MFA Game Music and Audio page on the ThinkSpace Education website for more details!
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