NYU’s New Online Course: Teaching Audio Mixing Through Peter Gabriel Tunes

Rob Walker
·Tech Columnist
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If you’ve always daydreamed about what an awesome music mixer you’d be — and, also, if you really, really love Peter Gabriel — you may be in luck.

Starting May 16, a new class offered online by New York University’s Music Experience Design Lab will teach participants the nitty-gritty of audio mixing, editing, and effects, all through the music of Peter Gabriel. The class will use the previously unreleased original multitrack stems of Gabriel’s classic songs “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes” — provided courtesy of Gabriel himself.

Also: The class is free.

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The online mixing board for Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”

The course’s co-creator Ethan Hein writes on his blog that you won’t need to go buy a bunch of fancy-pants software to participate; part of the idea for Play With Your Music (a collaboration between NYU, Peer 2 Peer University, and the MIT Media Lab) was to put together a highly accessible online curriculum that doesn’t require anything more complicated than easily used Web tools.

Details about the course (which appears to mix the practical with the theoretical, and which also includes video lectures and Q&As with various past Gabriel collaborators) are here, and NYU Music Experience Design Lab head honcho Alex Ruthmann gives an overview in this video:

This is the second iteration of Play With Your Music, and using those Gabriel classics as source material is the major update — and a smart one, I’d say. While my expertise with audio software is minimal at best, it just sounds way more fun to futz with a super-familiar radio stalwart than with anonymous sounds. Among other things, it’s got to be a lot easier to hear the difference you’re making when you remix a song you’ve been unable to get out of your head since the last time you saw Say Anything.

In any case, the maneuver appears to hint at the direction Play With Your Music is headed: “We’re already talking about future iterations of PWYM that will focus on other styles of music and other definitions of musicianship,” Hein writes, “from film scoring to hip-hop.”

Learn more about the course, and sign up, here. Or, Hein writes: “Get a taste right now, if you want, you can try mixing ‘Sledgehammer’ this very minute.” Personally, I think I’d need a few classes first.

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