Facilities and Equipment

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 professional 5:1 sound system using large Genelec loudspeakers and has AV facilities with a large projection screen.

Lecture Room

The majority of smaller classes and seminars are held in a lecture room situated in the Department's main building Divinity House. This room has a high-quality stereo sound system and AV facilities.

Music Technology Suite

The Department’s Music Technology Suite is located across Windy Gap, just a few yards to the north of Divinity House and is an annexe of Palace Green Library. It consists of a Music Technology Lab for music students, a Studio and the Department’s Workshop. The Music Technology Lab contains a mix of Mac and Windows OS audio workstations with much of the music technology software found in the studios. The Workshop is also the office of the Department’s technical staff, and technical support is available during office hours when required.

Practice Rooms

Rooms for individual practice and group rehearsals are available on the second floor of 49 North Bailey and can be booked out free of charge by music students. The four practice rooms are soundproofed and acoustically treated. Practice room 1 is the largest and is equipped with a Yamaha C3; practice room 2 is medium size and is equipped with digital stage piano, drum kit, bass and guitar amps, and PA; practice room 3 and 4 are suitable for individual or small group practice and are equipped with vertical pianos Yamaha B3 with Silent technology. In addition, two spaces in Divinity House (Concert Room and Lecture Room), each equipped with grand piano, can also be booked by students when not required for teaching or performances.

Studios

There are three Departmental music studios. They are situated in three different buildings and are used by staff and by students working on course work or research projects. They include a wide variety of equipment for music production that spans from the early analogue era up to the current technology and computer-based software.

The Recording Studio

The Recording Studio in 49 North Bailey comprises a control room, and up to three recording rooms (live room, practice room 1 and practice room 2). The space has been fully soundproofed and acoustically treated. The state-of-the-art equipment available includes the professional recording console SSL AWS 924, Pro Tools HDX on Mac Pro, Motu 24 I/O on PC, 5.1 surround monitoring on ADAM S3X-H, and various outboard sound processing units.

ADAL - Audio-visual 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.

MSL - Music and Science Lab

This lab has four data analysis workstations and specialist equipment to capture, measure and analyse musical behaviour, supporting any empirical work on music psychology, ethnomusicology, music technology and medical humanities at various levels (UG, PG, and post-doctoral). Available equipment includes portable physiology response kits, electroencephalography system, recording and playback equipment, audience response capture devices, acoustically controlled listening environment.

Music Technology Workshop

A fully equipped workshop supports the day-to-day running of all the Department's facilities. Staffed full-time by the Department's Senior Technician Martin Allison and Technical Manager Simone Tarsitani, 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 loudspeakers. The central operation is from a large 24 channel Allen and Heath front-of-house audio mixer and a laptop-based portable 18 in / 16 out system for sound processing diffusion tasks and high-quality multi-track audio recording.