UCI Sound Design is Recruiting MFA students!

It's January, which means that UCI Sound Design is officially recruiting for our MFA class of 2026.  Have you been thinking about grad school for sound design, we want to hear from you!

If you think that a Sound Design MFA may be the next step in your career and/or creative life, we think you should give UCI a look.  We're proud of our program and the students who study with us, and we want to talk to you about what we can offer your education and whether we might be a good fit!

If you're interested in learning about UCI Sound Design, here's what you should do:

1. email Prof. Vinnie Olivieri at olivieri@uci.edu to introduce yourself and set up a time to chat
2. head over to our program website to read about the program.
3. bookmark the application page for all UCI graduate admissions.

Drop us a line!  We'd love to chat with you!

And, for the algorithm, here are some photos of UCI MFAs doing awesome things in our program.

Students at Meow Wolf's Omega Mart on a field trip for their Themed Entertainment Class.

Kissing the duck brings good luck.

Walking from building to building on a tour of the Meyer Sound Lab facilities.

Students, alumni, faculty, staff, and a significant other at our annual Holiday Party!

Was the Escape Room trip part of Themed Entertainment research or team-building?  Why not both?

Students, faculty, staff, and alumni at USITT's 2022 conference.

A student mixes on L-ISA at L'Acoustics' North American HQ.

 

Jeff Polunas to leave UCI Sound

We were disappointed today to learn that Jeff Polunas, our Sound Supervisor for the past 4+ years, will be leaving UCI early next month to take an Assistant Professorship at Kent State University, where he'll be teaching sound design and projections.

Jeff has an MFA from UCI in Sound Design, and he came back to work as the Sound Supervisor from a teaching position at CalState Fullerton.  In addition to his work at UCI's School of the Arts, serving Drama, Dance, and Music productions, he also maintains an active freelance career, designing shows around the southern California area. 

At UCI, Jeff's work as the Sound Supervisor meant that he also always worked closely with the MFA Sound Design students, supplementing their coursework and design work with a strong technical foundation and skillsets.  He truly was a partner to Mike and I in the sound design program, and he leaves big shoes for us to fill.

We all wish him the best as he heads to Ohio for his new position.  Kent State is lucky to be getting him!

Track and Field 2020

 In my Trends in Modern Sound Design class, we often do an iterative hot-potato project called Track and Field.  It's an opportunity for the students to work on efficiency, conceptualization, and workflow. Here's how it works:

1) On the first day, each student brings in a 30-second piece of audio of their own creation.  The audio can be anything, from field recordings to original music to a short narrative. Students bring in both a rendered audio file and individual stems, and may spend no more than 60 minutes in the studio working on it.
2) Each submission gets passed to another student, then uses the original material as the starting point for their own work. Again, they must limit themselves to 60 minutes of studio time and 30 seconds in duration, but other than that, they can do anything they want. Students turn in both a rendered audio file and individual stems.
3) We repeat that over and over, with a matrix set up in such a way that each student usually gets to work on each thread.

This quarter, I had eleven students, so there are eleven threads.  I've taken each thread and strung each iteration together in sequence, so you can hear how one thread changes as different designers get their hands on the material.  Enjoy! 

(side note: Thread 7 featured some prominent commercial music, so SoundCloud won't let me present it to you.  Your loss!)

vrojr · Track and Field 2020

Sound Art: final projects

This term, I taught a class in Sound Art.  The course itself lent itself to self-direction. Each week, students would read for an hour or two on a sound art-related topic of their choosing.  When the class met, we would incorporate their readings into the discussion.  Our topics ran broad, from the definition of sound art, to social responsibilities (or lack thereof) of artists, to the role of virtuosity in artmaking, to the technical tools for implementation of sound art.

Additionally, students worked on three projects, the last of which was a sound art piece of their own creation.  Last week, the students presented their final work.  I won't go into the details of the pieces, except to say that they had a huge range.  One student created a balloon-festooned sound walk. One placed contact microphones on a campus bridge and used the inputs to create new content. One created an interactive sculpture using mirrored cubes, hyperdirectional loudspeakers, and QR codes.  The pieces were varied and very interesting.  Here are some photos!

Honors in Sound Design: Karli Blalock

The Design faculty at UCI is delighted to announced that Karli Blalock has been granted Honors in Sound Design!  Karli has only been studying sound for a year and half, but she made up for lost time with meteoric growth. Her design and technical skills have developed quickly, and recently created an excellent sound design for a workshop of The 39 Steps (if you know the show, you know how big that design is).

Karli has taken a number of sound design classes with the MFA students, and she's worked alongside them in production and crew work.  She's assisted on some large shows and designed a bunch of smaller projects.  She is tireless and always up for a new challenge. Mike and I are disappointed that she's graduating this spring, but we know that wherever she ends up, she'll make great work and do great things!

Congratulations Karli!

UCI Sound's class of '17

All of us who are part of the UCI Sound Design Program are excited to announce our two incoming students next fall. Here they are, the Class of 2017:

Andrea Allmond is currently working on staff at Dallas Theatre Center.  She's a Texan through and through, which is terrific for us, since our current resident Texan is graduating this spring. Andrea did a lot of conceptual sound design work in her undergraduate training, and she's filled out her technical chops at DTC working on the sound crew. Also, she boxes (!)

Ben Scheff will be moving all the way across the country from Boston (my favorite East Coast City).  Like Andrea, he's been out of school for a few years.  He is currently the Sound Engineer at Boston Conservatory and the TD at Circus Smirkus.  When not working those gigs, he also freelances around the New England area.

Mike and I are delighted to have Andrea and Ben join us next year.  We had a number of terrific applicants, and we're really looking forward to our new additions.  

Onward and upwards!

We're looking for a few good designers...

TWO in fact!

It's January, which means that soon it will be LATE January, which means that soon Prof. Mike Hooker and I will start looking for two exceptional sound designers to join us at UCI for their graduate studies.  That could be you!

Are you ready for graduate school in sound design?  Well, go ahead and check us out at our official home on the web. We've got a dandy site there with information about faculty, staff, student, curriculum, and facilities.  If you've got any questions, you can always email Prof Hooker or I for more details.  We're both happy to answer any questions.

Choosing a graduate program is not easy. When choosing the right program for you, you'll need to consider curriculum, faculty, student colleagues, facilities, geography, design opportunities, and cost! Everyone considers these issues differently, and how they weight these factors can dramatically affect their choice of graduate programs. Prof Hooker and I are both happy to answer any questions you may have about our program here at UCI.  We want you to make the best decision for you!

One common concern that I often encounter when talking with potential design students is cost. There is a common belief that grad school is expensive. It can be, but at UCI, we have a generous financial package. It's too early to talk details, but if you are concerned about paying for graduate school, email me, and I'll be happy to explain things in more detail.

If you are interested in UCI's Sound Design MFA program, then there are two avenues available to you for an interview:

• On 31 January, Prof Hooker will be at the URTA interviews in Chicago.  If you're going, he'd love to meet with you.
• If you are not registered with URTA, then you can apply directly to UCI through this link.

Prof Hooker and I are both very proud of the Sound Design program we have built at UCI. It's among the best in the country, and our students are all talented in many different ways.  But two will be graduating this spring, and we're going to be looking for two more to take their place.  That could be YOU!

Track & Field

This year, as part of the Trends in Modern Sound Design class, we worked on a project called Track & Field.  Last year, Stephen Swift (MFA '13) oversaw the first version, and this year, we refined it a bit.  Track & Field is based on Layer Tennis, a fun exercise in inspiration and workflow.

In Track & Field, each week, the player is given a 30-second clip of sound (bounced and stems). The player has 60 minutes to transform that piece into something else. They can record, remix, process, loop, crush, reconceive, redevelop, and/or do anything they want. The only hard and fast rules are that the player not take more than 60 minutes to work on the piece and that the piece lasts only 30 seconds. The player then creates a bounce and stems of their work and delivers it to the next player.  Play repeats.

Track & Field is a great exercise for a number of reasons. First, it's great practice for non-linear conceptualization. Also, it encourages the development of efficient workflows. Doing it in the Fall Term gives the students a chance to reconnect after a summer apart, and it gives everyone an opportunity to listen to and learn from each other.

We have six grad students, so we had six different threads.  I developed a rotation scheme so that every student got to work on every thread at least once.  Every week during the term, we listened to the current versions of each thread, and on the last days of class, we listened to each thread straight through, from version 1 to version 9.  It's fascinating to listen to how sonic elements transform through the piece, and how one idea transforms dramatically into another idea.

Here, for your listening enjoyment, are all six threads. Some are crazy rides, and some are confusing. Don't worry about it. Just enjoy the oddball cocktails that the MFA designers made!

On women in male-dominated fields...

Last fall, I wrote a post for this blog about women in sound design. I talked a bit about the numbers gap between men and women, some of the root causes of the problem, and some of the ways that we try to address it at UCI.  That post got a lot of page views (over 1000, which is a huge amount for this blog), and it's led to many conversations and projects that I've been engaged in over the last year.

On a related note, the New York Times had a feature piece today about women and the Harvard Business School. HBS administrators had noticed that women entered the program with comparable test scores to their male counterparts, but once at school, fell behind academically. Also, the number of tenure and tenure-track women lagged significantly behind the men. HBS faculty decided to study and experiment to see if they could address and solve some of these issues.  They implemented a series of seminars, study methods, in-depth evaluations, quantitate studies, and other activities to measure and encourage stronger performance by women.

It's a fascinating article, full of nuance, disagreement, and marvelous stories. I highly recommend it.

Can Sound Design be taught online only?

The Designing Sound Blog posted a piece today about Edinburgh Napier University's new all-online Sound Design program. This is apparently the very first all-online Sound Design program, and it got me thinking about how successful one of these all-online programs could be.  Certainly, there are things that could be done quite easily in an all-online fashion - final projects for film & game courses, programming, technology research.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things that you can't get in an all-online program. The two biggest things for me are face-to-face relationships with your students/faculty (which, for me, is a vital part of how I teach), and the fertile environment of a design studio (where many students work in the same physical space). Neither of these things could be done in an all-online format, and I think they'd be a huge loss.

ENU, to its credit, is really aiming their new program at a very specific group of students: working professional engineers who want to move into design. The course of study involves turning those professional relationships into educational opportunities as well, and the program of study is classified as part-time.  So, if you've already got a professional career that you want to keep, this program might be of great use to you!

But, for me, I prefer teaching and working in meatspace, not cyberspace.

Cinthia Palmer: Honors in Sound Design

Mike and I are proud to announce that we have a new Honors in Sound Design student. Congratulations to Cinthia Palmer, who was granted provisional honors status at a meeting of the design faculty yesterday!

Cinthia came to UCI in the fall of 2011 and quickly made herself an indispensable part of the sound design program. She's taken a number of graduate level classes and has worked on a number of mainstage shows, including assisting on Orlando and serving as an actor and chief foley artist for The Radio Plays. She's creative, bright, and always thoughtful, and we're proud of her and her achievement as a sound designer.

You can check out Cinthia's work at her portfolio website.  

Congratulations Cinthia!

Field recording at Black Star Canyon

Last week, my Trends in Modern Sound Design class (which has all six MFAs and a few other students) got up early to truck out about 40 minutes into the desert-y mountains on the east side of Orange County. The class is a rotating topics course, and this year, we decided to take a field recording trip.  Black Star Canyon is fairly quiet (except for the occasional jet or bird chirp), and we wanted to take advantage of the quiet to record some larger machinery sounds.  We settled on two sets of sounds: an old quirky car and smashing machinery.

I divided the class into four groups: near-field recording, mid-field recording, far-field recording, and special projects (including contact mics). Each group had two students and was tasked with strategizing and assembling everything they'd need to make the recording. They assembled cable, microphones, recorders, batteries, tape (sticky, not magnetic), and other necessaries for their particular responsibility.

On the morning of the session, we assembled on campus and caravanned out to the Canyon. First up was an old (200,000+ miles) car with worn tires and busted shocks.  Then, an old beat-up air conditioner.  Then, a lamp.  Each time, the groups strategized and worked together to get the best recordings they could.

Right now, each group is editing their data, cleaning it up, labeling files, adding metadata. When they're all done, we're going to add the sounds to the UCI Sound Effects Library and make them public for all of you.  Until they're done, however, here's a video diary of our trip to amuse you:

On Women in Sound Design

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Sound Design and its related fields are lacking anything close to a gender balance. The vast majority of designers in MFA programs are men. The vast majority of designers in the freelance world are men. The vast majority of people who work sound on Broadway, work for sound-related companies, work in sound design training programs, or work on the sound crews in regional theaters are men.

It’s a shame.  And we all know it.

So, why aren’t there more women working in sound?

The answer is not because women can’t ‘do’ sound. There are some great women sound designers out there: Janet Kalas, Liz Atkinson, Veronika Vorel, Jana Hoglund, Elisheba Itoop, and the Tony-nominated Cricket Myers all do excellent work (and to my ears, the percentage of women sound designers who are talented is vastly higher than the percentage of men sound designers who are talented).  There are great women working in non-design capacities: Liz Coleman & Bridget O’Connor in NYC and Amy Wedel at Baltimore Center Stage are all highly skilled. There are talented women working in the business side of sound: Ellen Juhlin at Meyer Sound is a constant fixture at conferences and events worldwide (and, of course, let’s not forget Helen Meyer herself!). MFA programs around the country are adding women sound designers to their faculties.  Eileen Smitheimer at U. Delaware, Victoria Delorio at DePaul, and EunJin Cho at Louisiana State are some of the few female sound design professors, but they’re joined in the (academic) gown this year by two exceptional women: Amy Altadonna at UMass-Amherst and Sarah Pickett at Carnegie Mellon University.  Each of these women proves every day that women CAN ‘do’ sound.

The problem is not that there aren’t ANY women who can ‘do’ sound. The problem is that there aren’t ENOUGH women who can ‘do’ sound. The cause for that, I think, is easy to identify: the institutionalized chauvinism inherent in almost every field that could factor in to an interest in sound design.  Consider these various ways that a young person might be first introduced to sound and sound design:

• Working on stage crews in school or at local music clubs. Stage crews are often male-dominated, and chauvinism is rampant.
• Composing music. While music performance is much more fairly balanced by gender, composition is still dominated by men.
• Theater Design, except for costume design, is still a male-dominated field (we have eight design faculty in design at UCI, only two of which are women), and it’s easy for educators to overlook interested students who don’t match their image of what a designer should look like.
• Science and the scientific mind. Despite early test scores that reflect equal intellectual aptitude in math and science, girls are often left behind in science classes at an astronomical rate. After many years of work by dedicated educators, this trend is starting to change, but there’s still a lot of work to do in this area.

Say you’re a young woman with an aptitude for sound.  In order to discover sound design, you have to thread a gender needle. Maybe you’re good at science, but you have to get through school without giving up. Maybe you’re a bright composer, but you have to have the right opportunities to shine. Maybe you’re technically inclined, but you need to convince the crew chief that you’re not a weakling full of dead weight before you can go near the sound console.

Solve for XX (that’s a chromosome joke…)

If we want to bring more women into sound design, we need to attack on all of these fronts simultaneously, and while none of us can do everything, each of us can help in our own way. At UCI, here’s what we’re doing to promote women in sound:

• Cultivate undergraduate sound designers of both genders. Our first contact with undergraduate students is usually through a class called Drama 50D: Introduction to Sound Design, and it is usually during that class that undergrad students start to discover sound design. We’re very alert to any and all aptitude for design in the class, and we work very hard to fight against the tendency to focus on men during technical discussions.
• Graduate student population. Even though our program is still fairly young, we have a strong history of women in our sound design program. In the last four classes to leave UCI, we’ve had three women (Cory Carrillo, Noelle Hoffman, and Beth Lake), all of whom are doing excellent work now that they’ve left UCI. Having a high rate of women in the program has a number of benefits unconnected to the women themselves: 1) a visible plurality of women is another way to indicate to undergraduate students and potential MFA students that women are welcome in our program, and 2) a plurality of women serves as a deterrent for the men in the program (faculty, staff, and students) to accidentally lapse into chauvinist behaviors.
• Recruiting. Understanding that young women lack the institutionalized support to discover sound design (see the previous section), it’s unsurprising that women are deep in the minority of the application pool. Because of the lack of support that women in sound, science, and/or design often get, we operate under the assumption that the average woman applying to our program has had less experience, mentorship, and encouragement than the average man. That doesn’t mean that she’s any less talented; rather, it just means that on average, she may not appear as strong as the male applicants.  To counter this, when we recruit, we take an extra-close look at female candidates, digging deeper to see if what may appear to be an unqualified candidate is actually a diamond in the rough. (I want to be quite clear here – we do not practice any sort of Affirmative Action, and we would not accept an unqualified woman instead of a qualified man. We simply make an extra effort when reviewing female applicants.).

In Conclusion

Every few months, I have another conversation with a different colleague about women in Sound Design, both professionally and at UCI.  During those conversations, most of what I’ve written here comes up, and I’m happy to have the conversation multiple times to keep the topic at the forefront of our thought. I typically wouldn’t write something like this on the blog; it’s a sensitive subject, and I’m sure I’ve rubbed someone the wrong way. However, we’ve recently started classes for the year, and for the first time since we’ve had a full roster of sound design MFA students, we only have one woman student. The dearth of women is not for lack of trying, but in the last two years, we have not found any women that we thought were ready for UCI Sound. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places?

At any rate, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I wanted to take a time to reaffirm our commitment to women in sound design and to confirm that I am looking forward to having more women join us in the future.  If you’re a woman sound designer (or a man, for that matter), and you are interested in UCI Sound, please drop me an email of introduction and let’s talk.

(note: the views expressed above are entirely my own and do not reflect the views of UCI, UCI Drama, or the UCI Sound Program)

Special Guests: Nagel and Frears

Yesterday was a day full of special guests here at UCI.  In Trends in Modern Sound Design, a rotating topics class for all MFA Sound Designers, we welcomed Andrew Nagel. Andrew works with L'Acoustics, a manufacturer of high end loudspeakers. L'Acoustics is based up in Ventura County, so it was an extra-special treat for Andrew to come down and visit with us down in Orange County. He talked with us for three hours about his career path from freelance design through consulting and ending up at L'Acoustics, his thoughts on education versus real-world experience, and some products that L'Acoustics has developed recently as they try to build market share in the theater market. He also invited us up to L'Acoustics in the future, and I'm hoping we're able to make that happen soon!

Mark, Brian, Matt, David, Andrew, Josh, Patricia, Michael, and Stephen

In the afternoon, we inaugurated the new Design Colloquium Series with a talk with Will Frears. Will is a busy theatre & film director, primarily based out of NYC, but he's in town working on Build at The Geffen Playhouse, which is currently in previews.  We invited him down to talk about his career and thoughts on the theatre with our students. We had a good turnout - not only were the designers present, but we had some actors and some undergrad directors. Will spoke for about 90 minutes, answering questions, telling stories, and providing advice to the actors and designers as they start to build their career. He had a lot to say, and we were glad to have him down.

Will Frears (left) talks with Head of Directing Jane Page and Sound Design Student Josh Fehrmann after the Colloquium.

Thanks to both Andrew and Will for taking the time to come down and talk to us!