Undergraduate and Graduate Education

MTA offers a small but highly regarded set of classes in music technology for students wishing to connect their engineering side with their musical side. Introductory topics include recording techniques, mixing and mastering in digital audio workstations, and sound design. Our more advanced classes require a command of music theory and computer programming. Interactive Music Systems blends audio synthesis, real-time graphics, and interaction design. Fundamentals of Music Processing explores the algorithmic analysis of digital audio, such as beat-tracking, chord-recognition, and music fingerprinting.  All music technology courses are project-based and include end-of-term public presentations (open houses and/or performances).

See information on the Music Technology Minor here.

Permanent Subjects in Music Technology currently offered include:

• 21M.080 / 21M.560 Introduction to Music Technology (Fall and Spring)
• 21M.361 / 21M.561 Electronic Music Composition I (Fall and Spring)
• 21M.369 / 21M.569 Studies in Music Technology: Musical Acoustics, Synthesis, and Audio Effects (Spring)
• 21M.370 / 21M.570 Digital Instrument Design (Fall)
• 21M.385 / 21M.585 Interactive Music Systems (Fall and Spring, same as 6.4550)
• 21M.386 / 21M.586 Algorithms and Interactions for Human-AI Music Making (Spring)
• 21M.387 / 21M.587 Fundamentals of Music Processing (Spring, same as 6.3020)
• 21M.470 / 21M.517 MIT Laptop Ensemble (Fall and Spring)

Topics Classes

21M.369 / 569 (previously 21M.380) is a “topics” class where the topic varies each semester depending on the instructor. You may take this class more than once and earn credit each time. These classes have generally been popular and are sometimes oversubscribed. To get in you should pre-register and attend the first day of class. You may receive a questionnaire on the first day as part of the enrollment decision process.

Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program (MTC)