Music, Sound, Design: Interview with Media Arts and Production graduate Ben Byrne
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Ben Byrne at UTS Studio
Laptop musician and Media Arts and Production graduate Ben Byrne says that his Communication degree exposed him to "new musics", allowing Byrne to merge his professional study life with his love of music and leading to an "unpacking of possibility" in media arts, which he has continued to explore ever since.
"Growing up, I always played music. I played various instruments from the piano as a little kid to in rock bands in high school and listened to a lot of music.
"But that was always very separate from school. I never really got sucked up in the romance of 'I'm going to be a rock star' - that never really sounded like much fun. Reading about Media Arts, I didn't really know what it would mean but it was a possibility which allowed me to combine my professional study life with my love of music."Held earlier this year, the UTS Music.Sound.Design Symposium - conceived as the platform for the development of a cross-disciplinary undergraduate program by the UTS Faculties of Design, Architecture and Building and Humanities and Social Sciences - succeeded in connecting the above disciplines through a common thread: sound.
As the coordinator of the Symposium, Byrne says that 'sound' should be understood as a flexible and versatile attachment to a degree, rather than a single, fixed field of study.
"Rather than approaching sound as a discipline, it's more about the fact that you could be studying to produce music or film or animation, installation, acoustics, you could be studying interactivity. But the common thing is the use of sound."
"It's introducing a new node in UTS where we recognise that this is a new point of connection. So what the Music.Sound.Design project hopes is not that this course becomes very exclusive but rather that it connects a lot with what's already in Humanities and Social Sciences and Design, Architecture and Building."
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