It's Academic:
Media Arts Institutions Have Arrived
by Dan Daley

Until the 1970s, it was still possible to become an attorney without having to go to law school. Many lawyers—several presidents of the United States among them, including Abraham Lincoln—learned their trade by apprenticeship, spending years within the art and science of the law under the tutelage of seasoned barristers. It has only been in the past 30 years that the law, like virtually every other discipline, would become so complex and specialized that the legal profession would mandate formal academic training before the term “Esquire” could follow a name.

Driven by quantum leaps in technology, the same evolution has taken place in the media industry, and at a much faster pace. For more than 100 years of media development, most of those wishing to practice sound, film/video, theatrical and other technological arts learned by watching and doing. But with the complex technological leaps of the Information Age, the old paradigm simply can no longer keep up.

The past quarter-century has seen a tremendous proliferation of media arts and sciences academic environments, in response to the knowledge that is required to work the levers of the entertainment media machine. The number and diversity of technology platforms, software and hardware, and the innovative techniques to use them have become too numerous to expect any one individual to master through an apprenticeship.

But the media schools are more than knowledge repositories. In a very real sense, media arts has become the liberal arts of our time. The opportunity to attend a media arts school offers students exposure to myriad aspects of what truly has become a diverse, global industry. Many students enter with one set of goals and depart having achieved those and much more, thanks to a chance to experience the entire landscape of media. Aspiring audio engineers get a glimpse of the world of animation, and the next Walt Disney has arrived; a video post-production hopeful gets a chance to feel the excitement of a live performance, and the course of theater production might be changed dramatically.

These are not opportunities that could come easily when sound, film and video students apprenticed in a facility that, by nature, would focus on a few core disciplines. The possibilities have always been endless; we can now thank this innovative generation of media academies for making dreams more accessible than ever before.

This edition of “Audio Education’s Finest” encapsulates many of the best of these media arts institutions in a single reference guide. Each school profiled here offers exceptionally high academic standards. They will each have differences that make them unique, but they are all dedicated to one thing: Ensuring that media, technology and the human imagination are able to intersect, and that creativity is able to blossom. •