3 Complementary Online Courses for Sound Designers/Musicians

If you have time (or can live without the latest tv-series for a while =P) and like ‘learning’, picking up an online course can be a nice change. Even if money is an issue there are quite a few options, tho I always go back to Coursera.. Or lately Kadenze.

From my experience Coursera seems to dive deep into the theory of whatever the course is about. And at best the case studies or practical examples rarely touch creative processes or artistic applications. It can be hard to wrap your head around or figure out the relevance to your creative work at times. Still if you like challenges go ahead! If you wanna start a bit more focused and build up as you go I strongly suggest diving into some of the online courses ‘designed’ for creative folks on Kadenze.

Lately I’m busy brushing up my old knowledge an adding new tricks in the bag or at least bettering my understanding of sound, interaction and computation. Gotta learn more about feature extraction, classification, parameter estimation, re-synthesis techniques, and all that stuff, since my focus is procedural audio atm. Well, aside from spatial audio that is…. Anyways, here is my selection, enjoy!

– Machine Learning for Musicians and Artists (on Kadenze – via Goldsmith)*
– Model Thinking (on Coursera – via Michigan)
– Physics-Based Sound Synthesis for Games and Interactive Systems (on Kadenze – via Stanford)

*If too simple then Machine Learning (on Coursera – via Stanford)