Academia

As well as my web work I also work at Leeds Met doing bits of marketing and student engagement. Yesterday we had 2 guest lectures, one featured Dennis Weinreich (Head of Audio and Post-production at Pinewood Studios) and Dave Turner (of Pepper Post), they gave a brilliant lecture on post-production work-flow and the relevant roles and responsibilities involved in this process, a really unique and useful insight. Then, in the evening, we had the inaugural lecture of Ray Russell – one of our visiting professors. His lecture covered his career in the music industry, was part-lecture, part-performance and was funny, charming and entertaining in equal measure.

However, my point is, neither of these lectures had an an audience of more than 60 students/people, which is so disappointing. Leeds Met has over 600 (ish) students studying music-related courses so even if all of the audience at both lectures was different students (which it wasn’t), that still only represents 20% of the relevant student body. You couldn’t even argue that the lectures were repeating themselves, Dave and Dennis concentrated very much on audio post-production, dialogue, sfx etc whereas Ray is a composer and musician, two very distinct and different professions and skill sets – albeit often closely linked. It is an almost constant frustration to me how little students seem to want to grasp the opportunity to meet and learn from people like Dave, Dennis and Ray – although these are all shining examples of the professions that these students claims to want to take up.

Dennis said something to me in an interview I was doing with him that I think possible hinted at the root of the issue. “Working in the music or sound field isn’t just about playing about in recording studios, you have to really love it” and the problem is, I think for many music tech/production students that the romantic ideal is far more attractive than the reality – which is a lot of hard work.