Acoustics and Music Technology MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Thursday our brass band rehearses in a church hall with a sprung wooden floor and a high, bare ceiling, and every Thursday the conductor tells the back row to play quieter because the lower brass is muddying everything. For a while I assumed we were simply too loud. In my third year I began to wonder whether the room was partly responsible, and that question turned into the most satisfying piece of work of my degree.

My final-year physics project examined a smaller space: a practice room in our music department that students avoided because bass instruments sounded uneven in it. Using a borrowed measurement microphone, an audio interface and sine sweeps played through a single loudspeaker, I recorded impulse responses at twelve positions in the room. From these I estimated reverberation times in octave bands and compared them with predictions from Sabine's equation, using absorption coefficients for the surface materials. Agreement was reasonable in the mid and high bands, but below about 150 Hz the measurements varied sharply with position. Calculating the axial mode frequencies from the room's dimensions showed several closely spaced modes clustering in exactly the range where the cello and bass guitar had been described as boomy. My supervisor suggested I treat the statistical reverberation model as a starting point rather than an answer, and the most useful section of my report ended up explaining why it breaks down in small rooms at low frequencies. I finished with a modest proposal for repositioning the existing bass traps, which the department has since agreed to try.

The project showed me that I enjoy the space between theory and messy measurement, but it also exposed gaps. I could describe modes in a rectangular box, yet I had no proper way to model a room with an alcove and a sloping ceiling. Reading parts of F. Alton Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics helped with practical treatment, and Rossing's The Science of Sound gave me a clearer picture of how instruments radiate sound, but I want the numerical methods and signal processing grounding that self-study has not given me.

That self-study has been real, if uneven. Over the last two years I have learned Python and some C++, and I wrote a small plucked-string synthesiser based on the Karplus-Strong algorithm. Getting it to sound convincing meant understanding why the averaging filter in the feedback loop shortens the decay of higher harmonics, and why tuning drifts unless you deal with fractional delay. It is a simple instrument, but working out those problems taught me more about digital filters than any lecture had.

Alongside my studies I work around fifteen hours a week in the stores and loading bay of a regional theatre. The job is mostly unglamorous: checking in hired equipment, coiling cables, keeping the inventory accurate and loading vans on time. It has made me reliable under deadline pressure and comfortable asking technicians plain questions. Watching sound crews adjust a system for a touring show in a hall they had never seen before made the gap between a design on paper and what an audience actually hears very concrete.

The brass band matters to me for reasons beyond acoustics. I have played for six years, and for the last two I have kept the band's music library and arranged parts when players are missing. It keeps me listening as a musician rather than only as someone holding a microphone.

At postgraduate level I hope to study room acoustics and physical modelling of instruments in depth, and to develop the computational skills to simulate spaces I cannot easily measure. In the longer term I would like to work on acoustic design for rehearsal and community venues: ordinary rooms where better sound would make a real difference to the people using them every week.