Facilities

Concert Room
The Department is fortunate to have a beautiful performance space in its main building, serving as an ideal venue for performances by students and visiting musicians. The hall has two storeys of seating, is fully equipped with a high quality 5:1 sound system using large Genelec loudspeakers, and also has computer (PC) and video projection facilities.

Lecture Room
The majority of smaller classes and seminars are held in a lecture room situated in the Department's main building. This room has a high quality stereo sound system using ATC loudspeakers, computer (PC), video projector and interactive whiteboard.

Music Technology Lab
Our multimedia room provides students with a further 9 quiet dual-core PC digital audio workstations, running a wide variety of audio recording synthesis and video software. Computers in the multimedia room and the adjoining Studio 3 can be interconnected via the local University network to form large arrays of computers with real time audio and midi communication between them. Very large projects can be handled between the interlinked processors in this way. East West Symphonic Orchestra Platinum, which requires several computers working together to run it, is a good example. Also on the network is a central mass storage device of about 3-4 TB for general storage/transfer of audio/video files. This can be accessed from any department audio/video workstation. It contains the whole BBC sound effects library.

Practice Rooms
Rooms for individual practice and group rehearsals are available in all colleges, and can be booked out free of charge by music students. The Music Department runs rehearsal and studio facilities in three colleges (Van Mildert, Collingwood and University - see below), and three spaces in the Department buildings (Concert Room, Lecture Room and a further Seminar Room), each equipped with grand or baby grand pianos, can also be booked by students when not required for classes or performances. The Department plans to open further practice rooms for music students in 2013.

Studios
The Music Department runs six audio recording studios. Three studios situated in the main buildings are used by staff and by students working on course work or research projects, and include a diverse range of equipment for the recording and editing of music and the creation of electroacoustic music. Three more are located in Van Mildert, Collingwood and University Colleges, equipped with basic audio recording systems, which can be used freely by music students. Our studios are equipped with a wide variety of recording and sound processing equipment which spans the period from the early analogue era up to the latest present-day computer-based software. Computers are dual- and quad-core PCs and Apple Macintosh based Pro-tools HD systems.

ADAL - Audiovisual Documentation and Analysis Laboratory
For research on music performance the department recently acquired a professional and advanced system for location recording of synchronised multi-camera and multi-track audio, and a workstation for audio/video editing and analysis, supporting all industry standard audiovisual editing software.

Electronic workshop
A fully equipped electronic workshop supports the day to day running of all the Department's facilities. Staffed full time by the Department's expert technicians, Ron Berry and Martin Allison, the workshop has a considerable amount of recording and video equipment, much of which is available for loan to students.

Concert work
The department has developed a large multi-loudspeaker sound diffusion system employing Genelec and ATC loudspeakers. The central operation is from a large 24 channel Allen and Heath front-of-house audio mixer and a further quad core 20 audio channel PC for sound processing diffusion tasks and high quality sound recording.