The Department of Media Design and Technology allows students to collaborate across disciplines in an integrated manner and explore production challenges from the traditional to the contemporary. With the aid of the latest technologies, the training supports production design in the digital age for visual, lighting, sound designers, digital artists and scenographers for performance. The Department offers practical training in the School’s up-to-date laboratories to deliver Academy-wide productions, creative projects and experimental art. The curriculum features a blend of core production techniques, design aesthetics, as well as skills in the emerging fields of interactive programming, visualisation and media networking.
Evolved from the tradition of music production training, Audio Arts is highly focused in music composition, arrangement and digital production techniques.
Embracing the latest digital music & sonic arts techniques, the new strategy extends from standard music album production to the creative domain of audio content generation for digital art, virtual design and immersive media. It also aims to develop digital music performance techniques, i.e. Digital instruments (of gestural control, generative/ algorithmic design) as an addition to traditional music instruments or keyboard-based electronic music, which are seen as new and emergent among sound & music artists in the 21st century.
While the curriculum approach will take on a highly contemporary direction, the basic techniques of music recording and mixing will remain, in order to cater for the needs of those who desire to explore the music studio career in a traditional manner.
Emphasized on aesthetics, emerging technologies, and novel art of storytelling, the Media Scenography specialisation boasts a holistic and integrated approach of using media (sound, lighting, video and digital technologies) to reinvent, through technologies and pre-visualisation techniques of contemporary production.
It maintains tightly connected peer-learning in the core learning platform while enabling the flexibility of proportional interests across the disciplines of sound, lighting, video and digital media. The courses in the new curriculum will capture the essence of collaborative creative practices and interdisciplinary artist-technologists.
Emergent fields of digital technologies will be adopted, such as mixed reality, extended reality, virtual production and AI in contemporary theatre performance, media production, digital media art and entertainment events.
The newly branded Media Scenography specialisation will continue to deliver fundamental training in performance sound and lighting; students will acquire theories and techniques in typical theatre production and be competent as designers and operators in the current market while also being fully equipped to journey the disruptive future as an integrated artist-technologist.