The title of this unit should be "Film Music History ft. Video Games and TV". We did a total of two weeks on video games, one single week on television, and SEVEN weeks on film. The weekly readings are outdated and are really more about music theory and history than anything else. Classes are always silent, boring, and will run way overtime. She does not teach you anything during in class time, she just goes through what the readings are supposed to have taught you. There are also no lectures for this unit, or at least there used to be until three weeks in she deemed the lecture recording system dumb and therefore stopped uploading them. Instead she uploaded what seemed to be her lecture script and no slides. It's hard to tell what's crucial info and what isn't as important because it's literally just a wall of text on LMS. By sometime around week 8 there's just straight up no lecture script at all. 100% of the teaching comes from the readings. Do NOT take this unit if you are not a music student. Don't be fooled by its lack of prerequisites, the lecturer has her own expectations of how technical you must describe music in your reviews and essays but she will not teach you this. She marked me down for not using the word "dissonant", as a non-music student am I supposed to know what that means? The selected films that you have to view every week are even more dated than the readings and some have misogynistic and racist undertones. We did not see a single film from the current century. The only film I enjoyed was Empire Strikes Back, which was not available in the library so we were told to "acquire it by alternative means" AKA I had to download it illegally. The films are also scored so similarly that I found my reviews every week being practically the same. I think the lecturer may have this belief that film music is not meant to stand out which is why in all the films picked the music is used very predictably to fit what's on screen, but it would have been so great and enriching to explore a wider variety of films that use music differently, like Baby Driver, Into The Spiderverse, Kimi no Na Wa, etc. Or to even do a criticism on when music in film is used so predictably that you tune it out and don't remember it, like in many Marvel films. When we finally got to the topic of video games, the readings talked about Just Dance and Guitar Hero, which I found such a disgrace to video game music because those games use pop music not their own original scores. In class I was hoping for some great examples from Persona 5, The World Ends With You, or Nier Automata where the scores actually build the themes explored in the games. Instead, she showed us Fortnite, which doesn't have any music except when you do the cringey dance. She also asked us to review "Super Mario Rush" which isn't a real Super Mario game, it's actually a bootleg port over. I had to email her to point it out and ask if she meant "Super Mario Run", the actual Nintendo-published mobile game, after which she corrected herself. On the second week we got to pick a game we are familiar with to review and she wanted to go through all 14 examples she received from us but in the end she only had time for 4 of the 14 examples, and she skimmed through them so briefly that even though I was lucky enough to have my example in the 4, I didn't get to explain the use of music in the example. We spent more time shifting our chairs into circles and talking about bits of the reading that "stood out" with lots of awkward silence in between. The final essay which is worth 50% is due halfway in the semester which means I had to start writing it way before we even started on the topic of video games and TV, we had only touched film at that point. I basically went in blind when writing. In fact I feel like I have barely learnt anything over the semester doing this unit. I love film and games so much but this unit did nothing to feed that love and I wonder if the lecturer has any passion for film and games at all.

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2019