Sound Design

Sound design is the art and craft of creating and shaping audio for specific purposes: giving a film its emotional texture, building the sonic world of a video game, creating an immersive installation, or crafting the sounds that make a product feel intuitive and satisfying to use. It is a discipline that sits between music, technology, and storytelling, demanding both precise technical skill and a well-developed creative sensibility. The best sound designers understand that what an audience hears shapes what they feel, often before they are consciously aware of it.

At Edinburgh Napier University, this four-year, full-time degree includes a year abroad, providing the opportunity to study sound design in a different academic and creative context, broadening your perspective on how the discipline is approached internationally. Edinburgh itself is a stimulating environment for creative study, with a lively screen, music, and arts sector and a strong tradition in the audio industries. Across the programme you will develop skills in audio recording and editing, synthesis and sound manipulation, spatial audio and immersive sound, foley and sound effects creation, and music composition and production for media.

You will work with professional-standard software and equipment, developing fluency across the tools that practitioners use in real production environments. The critical and conceptual dimensions of the discipline are equally important: you will study the history and theory of sound in media, develop your analytical listening, and learn to articulate your creative decisions with clarity. A typical entry tariff of 168 UCAS points reflects the programme's ambitions.

Sound design trains your ear, your imagination, and your technical precision in equal measure. The collaborative nature of most professional sound work also means you will develop the communication skills needed to realise a director's or designer's vision while contributing your own creative expertise.

Graduates work in film and television post-production, game audio, interactive media, music production, live sound, installation art, and advertising. Many build portfolio careers across several of these areas.