educonference21

Curricular design of the audio emphasis route within the Universidad El Bosque music program: A space for creation and technological mediation for the cultural and creative industries
This process of curricular design responds to the need to expand the creative, labor, business and general innovation possibilities of music students during the professional cycle of the musical program, and especially within the emphasis of audio production.  In other words, the reform process has as a general objective to contextualize the implications of interdisciplinary creation research and innovation work of different value chains within the cultural and creative industries, where the appropriation of technological tools and competencies in audio add value to artistic (or simple) creation through its transformation from different technical/artistic production and postproduction processes, which give rise to complex creations in the form of products, services and results within different scenarios of large-scale reproduction.

Audio education in Ecuador: An overview of the music production program at Universidad de las Artes
Universidad de las Artes, located in Guayaquil, is the first publicly funded arts university in Ecuador and one of only four of its type in Latin-American.  The Music and Sound Production program, part of the School of Sonic Arts (Escuela de Artes Sonoras), is in its fifth year, with the first cohort of students already graduated.  This text will give a clear overview of the history of the program and how it’s becoming the leading music production program available in the country.  The paper also contains an overview of the current academic program, with a brief explanation of the curriculum and how it has evolved during the first years.

Inclusivity in Immersive Audio: Current Participation and Barriers to Entry
Media and entertainment companies have embraced immersive audio technology for cinema, television, games and music.  Meanwhile, in recent years there has been a rise in the number of organizations welcoming underrepresented groups to the field of audio.  Although some disciplines such as music recording are seeing an increase in participation, others are not keeping pace.  Immersive and spatial audio are disciplines in which diversity is measurably lacking.  Mixed-gender social media groups focused on audio are composed of less than 10 percent women and minorities, and groups dedicated to immersive audio exhibit poorer representation. Barriers to entry are societal as well as economic; however, outreach, networking opportunities, mentoring and affordable education are remedies have been shown to be effective for related industries.

Female Audio Educators: Why All Audio Students Need Them
While more women have entered into the professional audio field over time and increasingly impacted the industry, has the number of female audio production faculty in audio education programs also increased? What impact do female audio educators have on their students and academic colleagues?  This paper argues that female audio educators not only strengthen audio students’ preparation for work in the field by promoting a sense of equity along gender lines, but they subsequently improve the culture of audio production education and empower students to take their philosophy into the professional audio field.  The future of female audio educators is discussed, and the paper offers suggestions for increasing their recruitment into the academy.

Audio Education in Mumbai, India - Trends and Challenges
This paper is an exploratory study to analyse the current trends & challenges in the existing academic curriculums offered at various institutes imparting audio education in Mumbai, India. Systematic case study method was applied to understand the existing training structure of various Mumbai based audio education related training centres. The objective of the study was to derive a working model which can be suggested to the audio education authorities to be considered for creating a standardized program, in order to ‘holistically’ groom a Media professional who wants to pursue a career in Sound. The findings of the study highlight that both, profound technical & life skills knowledge need to be imparted to create competent audio professionals of the 21st century.

Who are we teaching? The changing profile of students learning audio production skills
This paper examines the changing profile of audio production students as the professional audio learning experience morphs from the apprenticeship model once prevalent in commercial recording studios to learning in college and university environments.  It discusses how the skills that were once the preserve of professional sound engineers, recordists, mixers, and electronic musicians are now prevalent throughout the music industry, and how, in many cases, the changing industry now requires musicians to be self-sufficient in terms of recording and producing their own work.  There is an emphasis on how students in any program of study within music-making should have opportunities for learning these skills in order to work as professional musicians upon graduation.

The Reflection Video: Students Assess their Virtual Exchange Experiences
As a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, I have been a collaborator on virtual exchanges with Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.  These virtual exchanges, termed Global Learning Experience (GLE) at DePaul, focused on sound design and music collaborations.  The final assignment of the project asked each student to record short reflection videos on their experiences during the GLE.  These videos were recorded using a webcam or cellphone.  The deliverable was not meant to be a highly edited and polished video but a document that reflected the positive and negative elements of the collaboration.