Program Overview

Why choose this course

• Our Music and Sound Recording degree is aimed at exceptional students who are primarily interested in engineering and music.
• You’ll gain a breadth of experience, numerous practical skills, and invaluable initiative and adaptability that will prepare you for a career in any area of the professional audio industry.
• Our Tonmeister Surrey graduates have gone on to amazing careers: from equipment design to film composition; from computer game programming to writing and producing hit songs; from designing broadcast studios to mixing the broadcast sound from Glastonbury.
• Music and Media facilities have recently gone through a £1.7m expansion and improvement upgrade, including custom-built performance and recording spaces with three studios, a multi-purpose concert/recital room, an immersive multi-channel speaker performance space, five edit rooms, 11 practice rooms and brand-new synth lab.

What you will study

The Tonmeister degree is made up of three areas of study:

• Technical understanding of audio
• Practical experience of recording
• Musical theory and practice.  

The technical aspects of our course cover the engineering components that contribute to modern sound recording and reproduction. This includes acoustics, electroacoustics, electronics, computer audio systems, sound synthesis and signal processing.  

The practical elements of your studies will provide you with tuition in recording techniques and critical listening. You’ll also apply technical theory by recording a wide range of music.  

The musical components of the course will develop your analytical skills and provide the opportunity for detailed study of creative disciplines such as performance and composition.

Music and sound recording (Tonmeister) placements

The integrated Professional Training placement will provide you with first-hand experience of working in professional audio and help you to make important contacts in the industry. You’ll gain valuable experience by working for a year in a commercial company such as:

• A recording studio
• A broadcasting company
• An audio consultancy
• An audio manufacturer
• A computer games developer
• A post-production facility.