Michael J. Murphy, P.Eng., PhD, is founder of the Audio Production Fundamentals Certificate at The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University, Toronto

Digital recording did to audio what cars did to the horse and buggy. And the digital revolution has in turn completely transformed the education of audio.

Education and training in audio production has had to become as diversified as its industry. Audio production professionals need to understand both the art of audio and the science of digital media.

Two years ago, Ryerson University’s The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education relaunched the Audio Production Fundamentals Certificate within its Radio and Television Arts program to more accurately define the skills needed by today’s audio professional.

While at one time audio production artists would only concentrate on audio production, the integration of various media types requires us to know all of that, as well as HTML, Flash, video recording, and database management. Since many of us are now working for smaller firms – or even ourselves – we need to learn how to run a business, secure financing, project management and marketing.

As the knowledge required to be successful in audio production expands, education is becoming an even more integral launching pad for future audio professionals. Many mid-career professionals are looking to schools like The Chang School to increase their skill set and take advantage of the many opportunities that have emerged in this radically changing industry.

But first, a bit of history.

From World War Two through the 1980s, news coverage, radio shows and all that great (and even not so great) music from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were created using the same analog recording techniques. At the end of the ’50s, the magnetic tape recording technology was refined to multi-track devices, but remained a mainstay for decades – with minimal change.

To cover the high costs associated with building recording studios and buying analog equipment, studio owners tended to be record labels. Because studios were primarily a closed shop, training was largely left to the studios. Those with an ear for the audio business more often learned the craft as assistant engineers to those who ran the large studios. If you were lucky, you’d get a spot as an apprentice.

But with the advent of digital technology in the early 1990s, the industry broke open – and has opened the door to a diverse range of opportunities for audio professionals.

In its beginning stages, the tape-to-digital capabilities made the prospect of audio production much more democratic. On a standard SVHS tape, you could put eight tracks of digital-quality audio relatively inexpensively.

In response, project studios began to pop up in homes and garages. These smaller studios eventually started to put pressure on the larger studios.

By the end of the decade, the next wave of digital recording technology emerged. The ability to produce, edit, distribute and store entirely digital recordings on a computer prompted sound quality to skyrocket, and costs for production to plummet. Learning how to use a computer became far more important than how to align a tape recorder.

Although this prompted the decline of even more large studios, opportunities within the audio production field have expanded.

Today’s graduates are recording and mixing music, sounds for interactive games, audio books, websites, web animations, live events, films and podcasts. They’re setting up streaming media sites for radio stations, taking older films and transforming the audio into surround sound, or producing audio clips for YouTube. More often than not, they’re doing all of these things at once.

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