Popular Music MA

Course overview

We welcome popular musicians in songwriting and performance keen to explore innovative and sustainable creative practice and to develop avenues of interdisciplinary and culturally aware collaborations.

This course aims to attract popular music performers and songwriters from around the world, and creative artists who seek new and dynamic ways in which to explore, extend, challenge and hone their craft in a global context.

• You'll aim to operate confidently in a range of professional environments as a critically astute practising popular musician applying established and innovative approaches.
• You should learn to excel in working both collaboratively and independently as creative popular musicians.
• We aim for you to develop key transferable skills that enable you to operate at the forefront of the emerging new music industries.

Why you should study this course

Throughout this course, you will have the opportunity to develop avenues of interdisciplinary, sustainable, and culturally aware collaborations that can challenge current approaches to the field, and open-up opportunities for innovative popular music practice².

• Access to our fantastic facilities: state of the art recording studios (including SSL and Neve desks), band rooms and performance spaces, iMac music suite including Pro Tools, Logic, Live, Max, Dorico, a Dolby Atmos/ambisonics studio and a VR/AR immersive studio⁴.
• As a graduate, you may find yourself working in the composing, recording, production, games, and screen industries, as well as across wider areas of the new music and audio economy.
• Dedicated, experienced and qualified teaching staff with a mixture of commercial, academic and research-related expertise at an international level (staff may be subject to change).
• Strong emphasis on the course on applied musical practice within a contextual and critical framework.

Careers and opportunities

The ethos of the course is to open-up opportunities for innovative popular music practice and to develop avenues of interdisciplinary, sustainable, and culturally aware collaborations that can challenge current approaches to the field.

The MA aims to develop your critical understanding of popular music within the broader media and performing arts sectors.

On successful completion, you should be equipped with the skills to:

• individually and collaboratively produce a range of popular music projects and outcomes for identified and diverse audiences and contexts
• justify and critically reflect upon the decisions made in the production of your own creative practice by applying a range of methods
• interrogate new and existing approaches to the making of popular music globally and employ the findings in their own creative practice
• demonstrate competence in applying knowledge and skills to produce professional work in the field of popular music that enables them to enter their chosen area of professional practice.

Following your studies, you could become music producers, sound engineers, composers, media and games audio/sound designers; audio post-production engineers.

Preparing our master’s graduates for onward careers is central to our approach to learning and teaching on the course. This includes developing authentic assessment, collaborative opportunities, placements, and advice and guidance for onward study on PhD programmes here and internationally (subject to availability²). Our three collaborative modules provide opportunities to work with students in music production. You will be able to take advantage of cross-school connections and collaborations, as well as placement and onward opportunities with the support of our Talent Team².

Careers in popular music are diverse and on successful completion of the course you could work in jobs such as:

• Music performance and session work
• Songwriter/composer
• Sound designer
• Music and sound composer
• Immersive technologist/Dolby Atmos producer
• Music criticism
• Music teacher