Sound
Sit for a minute. Do you hear that? That’s the sound of audio meshing with the visual arts. It’s music and sound design, production, and implementation. It’s looking at screen and space, mixing and streaming, collaborating and performing. It’s a combination of senses.
Other pages in this section:
SoundImagine what the world has yet to hear
Explore the rich interaction between sound and visual arts with a minor in sound. Through liberal arts and studio electives, it allows you to pursue historical, conceptual, and technical engagement of sound to complement your studio major.
Engage in listening-directed courses covering acoustics, cymatics, phonetics, multi-sensory cognition, time, and memory, sonification, sound design, soundscapes, music, performance, the language arts, and cultural studies.
Classes and Course Requirements
The Sound Minor requires 16-credit hours. Students in any major can elect to complete the minor with careful course planning.
Required Classes
Audio-Vision: Sound for the Screen & Space (3 credit hours)
Perceptual embodiment in aural and visual experience is explored while developing audio production techniques for the screen and space.
Sound Collaboration Seminar (1 credit hour)
A collaborative space for collective artmaking
Sound Electives (12 credit hours)
Choose from over 25 different Sound electives ranging from Sound Sculpture to Art History classes focused on KC Jazz.
“Sound is never alone—it’s always mingling with images, materials, languages, and anything that moves.”
Sound Faculty
KCAI faculty are artists, designers and scholars in their fields.
Lecturers
Bird Fleming
Greg Mackender
East Building
Nestled within the Photography and Filmmaking studios, Sound will have access to all the same equipment plus:
AV Production Space:
- Isolated Studio 1 (quietest place on campus)
- Isolated Studio 2 (both studios for voice, Foley, materials, instruments & SFX recording)
- Acoustically treated classroom for ensemble recording & multi-channel AV production
Equipment/Tools:
- Our own cochlear mechanisms for listening-directed work
- Mackie Mixing Boards & Speaker Systems for stereo & multi-channel production & installation sound design
- Rode condenser microphones (including a matched pair of RT2ns for stereo & Blumlein-array)
- Shure dynamic microphones
- Piezo contact mics (for listening to the interior world of materials)
- TC Electronics EFX devices
- Adobe Audition & Premiere for recording, mixing & sound-sync
- INA-GRM Spectral & Timestretching Tools
- Zoom H4s, H2s & an H6 for stereo & 4-channel ambient & onsite recording
- Apple computers for production (including AV classroom iMac)
KCAI SFX & Sound Arts Library
The KCAI SFX Library is a royalty-free Sound Effects Library created and maintained by the Sound Minor program for use in student and professional productions.
Please give attribution to KCAI SFX Library and include the student-artists names where listed in the credits for your productions.
The KCAI SFX Library was recorded and produced by students at the Kansas City Art Institute under the direction of Professor Dwight Frizzell, Sound Minor Head. Work-study assistant Tanner Williams updated and organized the current version, with notable contributions from Daniel D’Angelo, Barbara Magiera, Natalie Blue and Victoria Proctor.
The sounds were created by students in KCAI’s SOUND classes: Audio-Vision, Advanced Audio-Vision, Sound Sculpture, Sound of Painting, Sound-Text, Intermodulations, Experimental Documentary and the Foundation workshops Actions, Image-Sound-Text and Perceptual Narratives.
Sounds Featured in the KCAI SFX Library can be heard on this YouTube playlist.