MEDIAART 2G03: Digital Audio

Note: This is the "fluid syllabus" for the course MEDIAART 2G03: Digital Audio at McMaster University (Fall 2026 semester). Expectations, policies, rules, etc will be the same as the official course outline (which current students can access through Avenue and Simple Syllabus), but this fluid version is formatted differently to take advantage of web possibilities, can be navigated in different ways, has up-to-date links to more detailed resources of various types, and will be updated to refer to new resources as they become available.

Course Description

From the McMaster Calendar: "Introduction to techniques in audio recording, transformation, and delivery for diverse cultural and technical contexts. Listening, reading, discussions, and demonstrations will support the creation and critique of audio projects. Lecture, web module, tutorial (three hours); one term Prerequisite(s): Registration in Level II or above of any program Antirequisite(s): MMEDIA 2G03"

Welcome to MEDIAART 2G03: Digital Audio, a course in which we will explore sound and audio technologies, using them to create audio projects, such as music, sound art, sound designs, podcasts, performances, etc. I’ve had the privilege of teaching this course many times since Fall 2009, when I first began working at McMaster, and I continue to enjoy and learn from it (Fall 2026 will be my 23rd time teaching it, and my 71st course as an instructor). I’m looking forward to continuing to think with you all about these things - your thoughts, choices, work, and engagement will have a strong impact on what this course becomes for future students.

I strongly encourage each of you to visit me during my drop-in hours (Monday to Friday 3-5 PM, almost every day; or by email appointment). I’m happy to talk about anything related to this course, and I’m also happy to talk about other things as well (e.g. music, art, games, careers, graduate school, etc)! If the time of the drop-in hours doesn’t work for your schedule (or you come by at a rare time when I am unavailable), please do get in touch by email so we can find a time that does work.

Audio work often begins with a gathering of sounds, and also brings together various audio technologies, sources of inspiration in the work of other artists, and listeners/audiences. We’ll reflect on the ethics of all this gathering of audio things, in a way that is grounded in where and who we are, returning to the following question throughout the semester: What are our responsibilities (individually and collectively), gathering sounds together at the southwest corner of Lake Ontario?

The course is organized into nine practices (see Learning Outcomes below), which we will develop through both in-class activities and larger projects. All of the information on this course outline will also appear in a dedicated section of my web garden, which is also where text explanations of all of the basic "content" of the course will be provided as the course progresses, and also where links to related video materials will be provided.

I would like to thank the many past students and teaching assistants in this course, all of whom have provided input that continues to shape what it becomes. My stewardship of this course has been, in different ways and at different times, guided by echoes of the support and mentorship I have been privileged to receive – I am particularly conscious of, and grateful for, the traces in this course of gifts I have received from Orv Andersen, Kevin Austin, Christina Baade, Darren Copeland, Yves Daoust, Charlie Fox, Christos Hatzis, Michael Matthews, Bob Peske, Scott Prebys, Bernie Rose, Nadene Thériault Copeland, Eldad Tsabary, and Scott Wilson (along with many others).

Course Learning Outcomes (Practices)

Practice #1: assess the qualities of audio files/recordings and import them into fully portable digital audio workstation (DAW) project folders
Practice #2: make high-quality close and distant perspective field recordings with a field recorder
Practice #3: make high-quality, low-noise voice recordings in a controlled environment
Practice #4: apply editing, effects, and mixing to assemble sounds in iteratively improved compositions/designs
Practice #5: normalize and render completed digital audio projects in appropriate delivery formats
Practice #6: make new sounds via exploratory transformations of your own original recordings
Practice #7: use multiple techniques to create and record original synthesized sounds
Practice #8: engage stereo audio possibilities via panning, recording, pseudo-stereo, and stereo transformations
Practice #9: gently compress/finalize a DAW project in order to reduce overall dynamic range in genre/context appropriate ways

Required Material and Texts

You DON’T need to buy any books or texts: the online materials available through my web garden constitute the “textbook” for the course. Any recommended readings are either available open-access, or will be provided in Avenue To Learn on a fair use basis.
You DO need to have access to a “studio-grade” pair of circumaural, closed design headphones, without any active noise cancellation (or the ability to turn such cancellation off). Most of you will not already have these, so will need to buy them (with care, they are an investment that can be enjoyed in many ways for a very long time). An early online module in the class explains in more detail the considerations that go into choosing a suitable pair of headphones. Suitable headphones will typically cost between $50 and $200 CAD.
We’ll use the Reaper digital audio workstation (DAW) software heavily throughout the course. Tutorials and technical milestone materials, in particular, will depend on this excellent and extremely reasonably priced DAW (that can also be used on a fully-functional trial basis without charge). It is also installed and available in the Media Arts wing. You may wish to purchase a permanent license for the software, for your own use (I certainly recommend it). You are welcome to choose to complete projects and technical milestones with other DAW software, although all of our instructions and demonstrations will be oriented to Reaper.
You DO need to sign up for keycard access to the Media Arts wing (TSH-202B) and equipment reservation system (which lets you borrow microphones, audio interfaces, field recorders, synthesizers, etc.), and the surround sound studio. This requires the purchase of a key card for $10.00 (non-refundable) at the Humanities Media and Computing (HMC) service centre. See this link for further details (note: you need to be on campus or using the McMaster VPN for the link to work). Please sign up for this as soon as possible, and well in advance of your first assigned tutorial session.

Class Format

Each week we’ll attend an in-person full-class meeting, a.k.a. the “lecture”. This time will be used for experiments, demonstrations, listening exercises, discussions, and project ideation activities – all things which benefit from us being together in a shared physical space and time. Sound is strongly impacted by the specifics of the physical space in which it happens, so it is especially impactful to do audio things in a physical space that is shared with other people. Meanwhile, the in-person tutorial sections in the Media Arts wing are a great place for individual technical assistance as well as an opportunity to cultivate solidarity and support – an artistic and learning community – with your peers. Regular attendance at full-class meetings and tutorials will be crucial to developing competence in the nine practices addressed by the course (it will likely be much more difficult to meet the course requirements in the absence of regular attendance).

Please see Avenue to Learn for more information about class and tutorial locations, as well as contact information for the teaching assistants.

Course Evaluation

Assessment in this course works in a different way than what you might be used to. For several years now I have been exploring what is sometimes called “alternative grading.” I am convinced it is a profoundly positive thing, and am constantly striving for assessments that (a) provide a high level of clarity about how work meets or does not meet requirements, (b) invite artistic work whose motivations and aesthetic choices are different than my own, (c) support learning through feedback loops and resubmissions, and (d) ensure short-term difficulties (whether connected to disability, illness, emergencies, workload, etc) present no obstacle to earning the full range of available grades.

Your grade in this course will be based on the following evaluations:

a final audio project, due Sun 29 Nov at 10 PM, possibly presented in course-adjacent concerts
weekly practice submissions, worked on in tutorials and due most Thursdays at 10 PM
in-term multiple-choice exam #1, Sat 24 Oct - Fri 30 Oct, completed in flexible testing centre
in-term multiple-choice exam #2, Sat 21 Nov - Fri 27 Nov, completed in flexible testing centre
a final multiple-choice exam during the examination period (scheduled by the registrar)

Minimum achievement: The minimum achievement to to receive credit for passing the course is to submit (on Avenue) a final audio project that meets the minimum requirements for such a project. If you do not successfully complete this project, you will not receive credit for passing the course, regardless of what any other achievements in the class might have been. Full details of the project requirements will be available, from the beginning of the semester onwards, in the web garden for this course.

Base grade: Assuming that the minimum requirement has been met, your base grade on McMaster's 12-point scale will be the number of Practices (a.k.a. Course Learning Outcomes) that have been substantially and successfully demonstrated in either a weekly practice submission on Avenue (a focus of the in-person tutorials) OR directly in the final audio project, up to a maximum of 8 (B). If you successfully demonstrate all 9 practices, the base grade is still 8.

Exams: Your base grade can be increased by one point for every 2 practices for which at least 80% of the relevant questions are answered correctly on either the two in-term exams or the registrar-scheduled final exam (during the examination period). In-term exam #1 covers practices #1-5, and in-term exam #2 covers practices #6-9. The registrar-schedule final exam offers a second chance to demonstrate confident understanding of all 9 practices. Demonstrating that understanding successfully on 8 or 9 practices would increase the base grade by 4 points (e.g. a base grade of 8 would become a grade of 12 or A+).

Bonuses: Additionally, the base grade will be increased by one point if you present your work on an Acousmatic For The People concert (scheduled on campus at various times to be determined towards the end of the semester). I may also award a single additional point as a "kudos" for a very small number of final audio projects that are, in my opinion and sole discretion as the instructor, truly exceptional. Note that these bonuses are not necessary to achieve the full spectrum of McMaster's grading scale.

Resubmissions: There are no partial grades or credit for anything. Everything is either ACHIEVED or not yet achieved. Weekly practice submissions or final audio projects that are submitted in good faith (i.e. clearly represent a reasonable quantity of work aimed at the requirements) but which do not meet the requirements will be given the chance to RESUBMIT within one week of the date on which feedback is given, up until the date of the final registrar-scheduled exam.

There are two ways to resubmit something: (1) discuss the matter with your teaching assistant in-person during your assigned tutorial time, or (2) discuss the matter with me (Dr. 0) during my in-person drop-in hours. In both cases, meeting in-person will allow us all to be as confident as possible that the nature of the problem is well understood. Sometimes you might even be able to make a successful resubmission right there during the tutorial/meeting!

This way of approaching assessment may be unfamiliar to you: rest assured that we'll work through examples of how it works during our full-class meetings during the early weeks of the semester. Above all, I hope this way of assessing things encourages you to make excellent, brave, audio projects that take creative risks and explore personally meaningful stories/genres/formats, secure in the knowledge that (provided some relatively minimal and flexible criteria are met) your grade is not at stake.

More about doing your own work

Throughout this course, you are expected to do things yourself. For example, when fulfilling an expectation that has to do with field recording, you need to be the one with the field recorder making that unique recording, yourself, from where you are in the world at that moment. As another example: when a tutorial activity asks you to explore doing something in digital audio workstation software, you need to be the one actually exploring that something in the software, while listening and evaluating in the unique way that only you can do.

Submitting work that misleadingly gives the impression you did something yourself, when you didn’t, would be an academic integrity violation. In all such cases, the procedures and consequences outlined in McMaster’s academic integrity policy will be applied. Here are a few specific examples of things that would definitely create problems of this nature for you:

using external assistance (generative AI, a peer, whatever) to answer exam questions
using external assistance (generative AI, a peer, whatever) to generate or manipulate text components of final audio projects
submitting an audio recording made by someone or something else as if it were something you had made yourself
taking a pre-existing DAW project (for example, bought or found on the Internet), modifying it, and submitting it, instead of creating your own DAW project from scratch and following your own artistic instincts
using borrowed sounds (for example, from sample libraries, freesound.org, etc) without clearly communicating about what sounds are borrowed and what sounds you made/recorded yourself. Note that borrowed sounds may be used, here and there, to fulfill specific functions in audio projects or some (not all) practice submissions

If you are tempted to do something like the problematic things above, (a) first, please DON’T and (b) then, please reach out to me directly so that we can think together about what good ways of proceeding would be. I very much look forward to listening to the things that you create yourself using your own body, mind, knowledge, experiences, skills, etc.!

Course Schedule

No tutorials or full-class meetings the week of Mon 7 Sept. Before the first full-class meeting (or as soon as possible), please (1) review the course outline closely, (2) read “About Headphones” on the course website and acquire studio-grade headphones, and (3) please complete the self-introduction survey on Avenue to introduce yourself to the teaching team.

Week of Mon 14 Sept: focus on Practice #1 (Qualities/Projects) Practice #1 submission due Thu 17 Sept, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 21 Sept: focus on Practice #2 (Field Recording) Practice #2 submission due Thu 24 Sept, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 28 Sept: focus on Practice #3 (Voice Recording) No regular tutorials this week (National Day For Truth and Reconciliation) Note: There is no submission folder for Practice #3; it can be demonstrated/achieved by signing up for and attending a studio orientation session between Tue 29 Sept and Fri 6 Nov (sign-up will open Mon 28 Sept).

Week of Mon 5 Oct: focus on Practice #4 (Edit/Transform/Mix) Practice #4 submission due Thu 8 Oct, 10 PM, on Avenue

Mid-term recess, Mon 12 Oct - Sun 18 Oct

Week of Mon 19 Oct: focus on Practice #5 (Normalize/Render) Practice #5 submission due Thu 22 Oct, 10 PM, on Avenue

In-term exam #1 (practices #1-5) in flexible testing centre, Sat 24 Oct - Fri 30 Oct

Week of Mon 26 Oct: focus on Practice #6 (Exploratory Transformations) Practice #6 submission due Thu 29 Oct, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 2 Nov: focus on Practice #7 (Synthesis) Practice #7 submission due Thu 5 Nov, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 9 Nov: focus on Practice #8 (Stereo) Practice #8 submission due Thu 12 Nov, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 16 Nov: focus on Practice #9 (Dynamic Range) Practice #9 submission due Thu 19 Nov, 10 PM, on Avenue

In-term exam #2 (practices #6-9) in flexible testing centre, Sat 21 Nov - Fri 27 Nov

Week of Mon 23 Nov: focus on completion of final audio projects, including sharing almost complete drafts with peers during the week's tutorial sessions

Week of Mon 30 Nov full-class meetings: introducing diffusion; lines of flight (audio study and career possibilities) tutorials: assistance with projects and practice resubmissions

Final Audio Project due Thu 3 Dec, 10 PM, on Avenue

Week of Mon 7 Dec full-class meetings: practice for final exam tutorials: assistance with practice resubmissions

Acousmatic for the People concerts scheduled 7-18 Dec

Final multiple-choice exam during examination period to be scheduled by registrar

Late Assignments

If you are going to be a little bit late submitting a weekly practice item, please contact your teaching assistant to let them know. Late practice submissions (with notice) will be accepted up until the last day of classes. Submissions that are very late will receive very limited feedback, and that may make it difficult to make any necessary resubmissions in time.

If you are going to be a little bit late submitting the final audio project, please let me (Dr. 0) know by email. Late audio projects (with notice) will be accepted up until the last day of classes. Submissions that are very late will received very limited feedback, and that may make it difficult to make any necessary resubmissions in time.

While I’m here... Have you been wondering why the practice items and audio project are always due at 10 PM? Because sleep is vital to our health and wellness! The 10 PM due dates are intended to communicate that, wherever possible, as a matter of healthy and sustainable working habits, we should plan to complete our work in a way that allows us to sleep during the night.

Absences, Missed Work, Illness

We need to show up for each other as much as possible, including by attending full-class meetings and tutorials from the beginning to the end. But please don’t attend when you are feeling ill NOR when there are compelling circumstances that mean that you would not be able to contribute meaningfully to those meetings (e.g., personal/family emergencies, mental health crises, challenges with food, finances, shelter, etc.). You don’t need to explain such absences to me, although if you feel it would help to talk to me about it, I’m certainly here for that.

Our full-class meetings and tutorials are meant for active learning activities around the course practices/learning outcomes. Any fixed "content" has already been provided through the web garden. As such, our meetings and tutorials will not be recorded. If you miss one and would like to "catch up", I recommend you do so by (a) coming to my drop-in hours to talk about the things we did during the missed meeting at length and/or (b) talk about tutorial activities you missed with your teaching assistant at your next in-person tutorial session.

You don't need to complete the in-term or final exams if you are happy with the grade that you would receive without them. If you miss one or both of the in-term exams, the universal accommodation for this is that you are still able to demonstrate your knowledge of the practices/learning outcomes covered by those exams on the final registrar-scheduled examination. If you miss the final registrar-scheduled examination (and need/want to use it to earn a higher grade than you otherwise would) you will need to engage with the deferred examination procedure through your Faculty's advising office.

Generative AI: Some Use Permitted

Strictly speaking, so-called "AI" is not completely forbidden in the course. However, I believe it is mostly useless for our learning outcomes, and will not help you to make an awesome audio project you can be proud of nor to do well on the exams. Please see also the more detailed explanation in "More about doing your own work" in the "Course Evaluation" section of this outline.

(Note: For additional, official McMaster University policies/statements related to this course, please see the Simple Syllabus outline for this course.)