Arts of Sound and Image

Arts of Sound and Image

Course Type:
Master’s Programme

Programme Introduction

The Master in Arts of Sound and Image wants to provide a solid, broad and indepth background for creators who wish to define a singular artistic practice within the audio-visual arts, to explore flexible models of production and create an approach focused in the chosen artistic strategies, either in a specialized area, or in the passages between several fields.

The Master aims to cover a wide range of expressive modes: from film and video, whether fiction, documentary, film essay or experimental cinema and animation, to the sonic arts and photography, without beeing limited to them. The emphasis of the degree leans toward neither fixed professional formulas nor mere technical expertise, but rather toward a creative and critical engagement over the entire working process. Each student produces an audiovisual work, followed by a report, developed in an interdisciplinary context which aims to provide the technical, formal and conceptual skills appropriated to each project.

Programme Coordinator

Susana Nascimento Duarte

susana.duarte@ipleiria.pt

Reference

2152

School

Arts and Design

City

Caldas da Rainha

Language

Portuguese

Type

Morning & Afternoon

Length

4 Semesters

Vacancies

General and International student contingent: 25

Notice

Edital 2026 (PT Doc-Ret)

DGES certification

Objectives

Programme
  • Enabling specific skills for innovation in the several developing stages of the project in Arts of Sound and Image: in research methodologies, writing processes, structures of working and production, exhibition and display strategies; 
  • Promoting students’ autonomy for technological experimentation having in sight the needs of each project;
  • Extending the expertise of technical skills in film and video, photography and the sonic arts; 
  • Developing a proper discursive strategy capable of communicating the artist’s own decisions with the public, technicians, producers, curators and other cultural agents; 
  • Encouraging the development of a singular working methodology, able to articulate critical skills and material expression in the context of the heterogeneous panorama of contemporary arts and audio-visual technologies; 
  • Encouraging the involvement in the interdisciplinarity of the curriculum while concentrating on a chosen disciplinary area. 
1st Year
ID Name Semester ECTS Length
1st Semester 12 60 h
  1. Experimentation on the different audio-visual know-how, within collaborative projects, developed by groups of 3/4
    students, which promote interdisciplinarity as a core element in the process of creative involvement
  2. Key concepts related to the practice of collaborative arts: artistic production, subjectivity and community
  3. Thematic, conceptual and practical exploration, using one or more media, performance processes, intervention, programming, participation
    and interaction between the artist-student, the audience and a place (site)
  4. Examples of interdisciplinary practices within specific spatial and temporal contexts (site-specific)
  5. Production of documentation about the project in the form of a catalog, a video, or an audio work
  6. Interdisciplinary research processes based on practice – conceptual and audio-visual speculation.
  7. Role of research and interpretation in the production of collaborative artistic works
1st Semester 4 30 h
  1. Preparation of a film, associating with the narrative, visual and sound design, the exploration of photographic techniques
  2. Conceptual instruments of cinematography and their spatial disambiguations: aspect ratio, frame, shots, movement, light, pov
  3. Relationship between lenses (focal) and format (sensor) and the formulation of a spatial discourse
  4. Conceptual instruments of cinematography – temporal: obturation, ips – high speed, overlays, continuity, fragmentation, time-lapse, stop-motion
  5. Advanced cinematographic techniques in the control of recording devices – Digital video: formats, compression
  6. Visual organization – spatial and temporal – of a given subject adapting it to the technical choices
  7. Registration conditions – Relationship between elements / object / space /camera, fixed, in motion
  8. Critical analysis skills of cinematographic practices – Image work, and film enunciation skills; paradigmatic models of the work of the DF and the director
1st Semester 4 30 h
  1. Exposure, case analysis and group discussion of theoretical and practical issues specific to analog photography as a technology and as an artistic medium.
  2. Photography as a mechanism for controlling light and time
  3. Camera: deepening the notions of aperture, shutter speed, ISO,color temperature of light, focus and depth of field.
  4. Negative:deepening of light measurement (photometry) and film exposure techniques.
  5. Camera: developing capabilities in handling analog cameras of different formats (small, medium and large format).
  6. Negative:deepening the laboratory techniques of film processing.
  7. Print: deepening film enlargement techniques on different types of silver-based paper.
1st Semester 4 30 h
  1. Fundamentals of Sound, principles and methodologies in the field of Moving Image, based on the contexts of Audiovisual production;
  2. Auditory perception, modes of listening, situated experience, and the re-evaluation of the notion of ‘silence’—from auditory perception to a poetic destination: (in)action and the ethics of participation; notation of processes with implied sound expression;
  3. The ‘Audiovisual Contract’ (Michel Chion) and the relational dimensions between images, sound, and the visual;
  4. Soundtrack—Contextual relationships applied to diegesis and the narrative, artistic, and theoretical-practical functions of the constituent elements;
  5. Technological sound fixation: concrete-acousmatic music and artistic practices of field recording; Sound device, masking, and issues of intelligibility in audiovisual analysis;
  6. The art of ‘digital language,’ models of interaction and/or real-time sound interactivity, and the expanded sound object
1st Semester 3 30 h
  1. Romantic conception of author, collaborative art and participatory art. Beyond the distinction between authorial art (in the sense of a single individual) and collective or collaborative art. Theoretical and historical context. Examples, including the situationists. Félix Guattari and the denaturalisation of subjectivity. Subjectivity as collective agency.
  2. Cases and examples of artistic practices that make manifest and problematize different meanings of the intersection between territory and voyage, physical and imaginary, landscape andwalking.
  3. Open classes, of presentation of work, by artists, filmmakers, photographers, musicians. The theme of each session is related to the artistic practice/research of each guest.
  4. Presentation and discussion of the students’ research and artistic practice, articulating them with relevant visual and sound images from an aesthetic, ethical and political point of view for their work and that contribute to its analysis.
1st Semester 3 30 h
  1. Images of the informality of power
    1. Modulation: form-matter schema; materialism and style; materials/forces; the sublime, the formless; relations of forces
    2. Information: ideology does not exist; truth as to make say/to make see
    3. Apparatus: discipline and control; (de)subjectivation; simulation, habits and institutions; redemptive complexity; counter-effectuation and the ungovernable
    4. Mutations of the positivities: mute matter, life; discourse’s redundancy, language; the subject as information, workIdeas of political art
    5. Biopolitics: cross-section and governmentality; the animal as problem; onto-ethological resistance and animal heterogenesis; the government of nature
    6. The untamed politics of language: traces and testimonies; the condition of ‘in front of’; deactivation; imperative and the archeology of command
    7. Involuntarism: emergence of the involuntariat; philosophical archeology against will; figures of involuntarism; the dismantling of political axes
Project II 2nd Semester 12 60 h
Lab II -Cinema and Video 2nd Semester 4 30 h
Lab II – Photography 2nd Semester 4 30 h
Lab II – Sonic Arts 2nd Semester 4 30 h
Thematic Option II 2nd Semester 3 30 h
Contemporary Debates 2nd Semester 3 30 h
2nd Year
ID Name Semester ECTS Length
1st Semester 18 60 h
  1. Development of individual artistic practice, independently motivated and according to advanced and professional standards
  2. Analysis and critical discussion of ongoing projects in the context of contemporary audiovisual artistic practices
  3. Idea and structuring concepts of the work: interaction between intention, process,‘result’
  4. Research Daily Record – selection of ideas and key forms of practice, central to the interests in development in the projects
  5. The production of creative work for ‘art audiences’
  6. Dissemination of creative work: Issues associated with the context of reception assumed by the different project.
  7. Sharing of artistic and cultural events relevant to projects and their modes of professional presentation: conferences, films, literature, exhibitions, etc.
1st Semester 6 45 h
  1. Structuring, discussion, writing and approval of the Thesis proposals.
  2. History and theory of visual and sound forms, in relation to the history of media and an archeology of seeing and hearing
  3. Passages of the image, quarrel of devices. Specificities, permeabilities. Hybridization in contemporary art
  4. The cinematic mode of production, precursor to the Contemporary Digital Archive. Media and artistic creation in the “world of ambient programs”, of platforms for the instrumental
  5. organization of information
  6. 5.From technical-images to
  7. their program. Emergence and production of a new archive (i.e. knowledge) about man and the world, inseparable
  8. from audiovisual technologies –
  9. operational images, video games, VR technologies. Images as
  10. ways of exercising (neuro)power, of producing subjectivity
  11. 6.Documental, digital,
  12. mediumistic condition of the Archive: biopolitical and critical functions. Towards a new activist
  13. ecology of visual
  14. and sound forms
1st Semester 6 45 h
  1. Current philosophical and artistic issues in the field of audio-visual researchand culture
  2. Language and analysis of the audio-visual object
  3. Critical approaches: models and referencesResearch methodology in the field of humanities and arts
  4. Project methodology in the arts of sound and image (theory and practice)
  5. The collective construction of knowledge: citation, reference and intertextua-lity; creation andcopyright; research and “literature review”; the “state of the art”
  6. Critical thinking and writing practice
Final Project 2nd Semester 30

Entry Requirements

May apply to the master in Arts of Sound and Image (henceforth designated as MASI):
a) Holders of a BA degree or equivalent in Sound and Image, Cinema and in similar degrees or in artistic and related areas;
b) Holders of a foreign academic graduation degree, organized according to the principles of the Bologna
Process by an adherent State;
c) Holders of a foreign BA degree, recognized as relevant by the Technical Scientific Council of ESAD.CR;
d) Holders of an academic, scientific or professional curriculum, recognized as attesting the capacity to carry out this programme by the Technical Scientific Council of ESAD.CR.

International Student
All information related to the  international student application should be consulted on our International Students webpage.

Accreditation

State: Accredited
Number of years of accreditation: 6
Publication date: 30-09-2020
Accreditation A3ES

More Information

Contacts
E-mail: studywithus@ipleiria.pt

Online Application

Use the button bellow to start your application.

How to apply

Application Fee

60€

Enrolment Fee

General contingent: 50€
International student contingent: 100€

Tuition Fee

General contingent: 1140€
International student contingent: 3000€