Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

To write impactful music for film, TV and games, composers need to understand the conventions of music genres on screen. This course provides a practical and theoretical foundation for crafting music for action, adventure, romance, thrillers, drama and fantasy genres. Each week students will work on crafting music for a different screen example, learning the musical ingredients for different genres and how to vary them to enhance screen action. This course will focus on ideas of melody, harmony, tempo. instrumentation and orchestration for short screen sequences. Lectures will unpack screen music by composers like John Williams, Koji Kondo, Wendy Carlos, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Alan Silvestri, Hans Zimmer, Lena Raine, Yoko Shimomura, and Amanda Brown. The course assumes students will have some familiarity with music composition, music notation and music technology.