Diploma of Music

Choose a module from AIM’s range of music specialisation electives to broaden your skills and explore areas of the industry beyond your major. Available streams include Music Business, Composition, Creative Technology, Performance, and Acting (Sydney only).

Choose a module from AIM’s range of music specialisation electives to broaden your skills and explore areas of the industry beyond your major. Available streams include Music Business, Composition, Creative Technology, Performance, and Acting (Sydney only).

Introduction to Higher Education Studies builds the academic skills you’ll draw on across your entire degree. You’ll develop your written and spoken communication at a tertiary level, covering essay technique, referencing, and scholarly research practices, alongside a grounding in academic integrity and self-directed learning. Core classes are complemented by elective modules focused on specific technologies relevant to your field of study. 

This foundational unit introduces you to the core materials of music, including pitch, rhythm, and harmony, and is required for all BMus students, with the option also open to music business students looking to develop core musical skills. You’ll examine diverse musical styles to understand how these elements are structured and notated across different genres, develop your skills in reading music notation, and gain an introductory overview of musicology as an academic discipline and its approaches to music analysis. 

In this industry-focused collaborative project, you’ll apply your theoretical and technical knowledge in a practical context, working with peers within or across disciplinary boundaries to design and produce a musical work. Weekly lectures and group tutorials scaffold the process, with reflective blog entries used to evaluate your development throughout. 

This unit gives you a broad grounding in the music business, examining the history, function, and key activities of its numerous sectors. Importantly, it uses historical analysis as a springboard for forward-looking thinking, preparing you to understand and respond to an industry that continues to evolve. 

Building directly on BMAS1, this unit develops your musicianship skills, aural appreciation, and understanding of musical structures further. Online modules let you explore notation principles across genres and build arrangement skills relevant to your own musical interests, while classes provide opportunities to hear and evaluate diverse musical arrangements, laying the groundwork for subsequent music scholarship. 

Choose a module from AIM’s range of music specialisation electives to broaden your skills and explore areas of the industry beyond your major. Available streams include Music Business, Composition, Creative Technology, Performance, and Acting (Sydney only).

Choose a module from AIM’s range of music specialisation electives to broaden your skills and explore areas of the industry beyond your major. Available streams include Music Business, Composition, Creative Technology, Performance, and Acting (Sydney only).

In this industry-focused collaborative project, you’ll apply your theoretical and technical knowledge in a practical context, working within or across disciplinary boundaries to design and produce a musical work. Weekly lectures and group tutorials support the process, building toward a mid-term proposal presentation of your work-in-progress. 

This unit offers an introductory exploration of how the creative mind engages with the commercial realities of the arts and entertainment industries. Whether you’re a creative looking to understand the business landscape or someone from the industry side wanting to engage more meaningfully with music makers, you’ll develop practical strategies for navigating the intersection of creativity and commerce. 

This unit provides a practical introduction to the principles of self-management as they apply to the arts and entertainment industries. You’ll develop the resilience, emotional intelligence, collaborative skills, and problem-solving approaches that underpin a sustainable career, recognising that managing yourself effectively is as important as managing any external project or team. 

Composition Module 1 introduces you to the fundamental strategies of music composition and production at the heart of the Bachelor of Music’s Composition and Music Production program. Through a series of practical exercises, you’lldevelop a creative practice across melody, harmony, rhythm, sequencing, and form, supported by a combination of weekly seminars, tutorials, and self-paced online modules. 

Building on the foundations of Composition Module 1, this unit advances your skills in music composition and production, extending your creative practice across melody, harmony, rhythm, sequencing, and form through a further series of practical exercises. Learning is delivered through a combination of weekly seminars, tutorials, and self-paced online modules. 

The first of two Music Specialisation modules leading into the Creative Technology major study stream, this unit establishes foundational audio techniques alongside core acoustic and sound theory. You’ll develop practical and theoretical understanding across sound equipment, microphone types and placement, basic DAW usage, mixing desk fundamentals, EQ, and key concepts including frequency, amplitude, and acoustics, assessed through both a written examination and a practical skills assessment. 

The second of two Music Specialisation modules leading into the Creative Technology major study stream, this unit introduces you to the core operating principles of digital audio workstations and mixing consoles at a foundational level. You’ll build understanding across DAW navigation, editing techniques for musical and non-musical audio, MIDI editing, signal processors including EQ and compression, virtual instruments, and fundamental mixing, with your knowledge and critical listening assessed across two practical assessments emphasising standard workflow practice. 

In Performance Module 1, you’ll develop your instrumental or vocal skills through weekly private lessons and a Performance Practice class spanning masterclasses, workshops, and seminars, choosing a sub-specialisation in either contemporary or Classical music styles. Alongside the practical work, you’ll examine the cultural contexts of your repertoire and develop an informed approach to performance decisions across relevant styles and genres, building reflective practice as a musician throughout. 

Extending from Performance Module 1, this unit deepens your technical and expressive fluency through continued weekly private lessons and a Performance Practice class comprising masterclasses, workshops, and seminars. You’llcontinue to examine the cultural contexts of your repertoire and refine your understanding of stylistically informed performance decisions, while maintaining the reflective practice you began developing in Module 1. 

In the Acting Module, you’ll develop your skills as an actor through group instruction in masterclasses, workshops, and seminars, exploring the core principles of contemporary acting technique within a socio-cultural context. Reflective practice is woven throughout, with ongoing attention to your development and learning process as an actor. 

*Sydney Campus only.

In Acting 1 and 2, you’ll develop your skills as an actor through masterclasses, workshops, and seminars, exploring the core principles of contemporary acting technique and situating performance within a broader socio-cultural context. As the units progress, you’ll also build the habit of reflective practice, developing your capacity to critically examine your own learning and growth as an actor. 

*Sydney Campus only.

This unit traces the history and repertoire of Western art music from antiquity to the present, examining the socio-political and cultural forces that shaped it alongside the critical and cultural theories driving music scholarship today. Through listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities, you’ll analyse and evaluate music history through multiple critical lenses, developing the capacity for rigorous academic engagement with the repertoire. 

This unit surveys popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries, situating key figures and movements within their social contexts while developing your understanding of the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and textural structures across a range of popular styles. Online learning modules introduce the theoretical systems used to analyse popular music, and the unit extends into developments in popular musicology that bring cultural questions of gender, race, and protest into the analytical frame. 

This unit introduces you to the history, repertoire, and analysis of musical theatre, building your understanding of the genre’s sub-categories and the social, historical, artistic, and political contexts that shaped them. Through sequenced readings, listening assignments, and recorded productions, you’ll develop the analytical grounding needed for a deeper engagement with Music Theatre works. 

This unit traces the development of electronic music across the 20th and 21st centuries, examining the creative works of electronic music artists alongside the materials and processes central to their practice. Through listening, speaking, reading, and writing tasks, supported by online modules, lectures, and tutorials, you’ll develop an appreciation of the diverse range of works produced through electronic means. 

This unit surveys the history and theory of screen music across film and television, from the silent film era to contemporary small-screen practice. Drawing on practical materials including cue sheets, documentary content, and video clips, you’ll develop understanding of technical dimensions such as orchestration, drama, sync, digital audio and video, and mixing, as well as the practical realities of the screen music industry, including developing themes and motifs and working with a director. 

This unit introduces you to the history, repertoire, and analysis of Australian music across a broad range of genres and cultures, including Indigenous music, contemporary art music, folk, popular, and rock idioms. Multiple theoretical lenses structure your engagement with the material, with a particular focus on music since 1960 as a vehicle for social justice and political change. Learning takes place across lectures, tutorials, self-paced online modules, and guest presentations on Indigenous music. 

This unit develops your capacity to engage critically with game music, examining it from a range of design perspectives through audio and video examples and comparative analysis of key works. You’ll also explore industry-standard middleware and authoring software, building an appreciation for the structural and textural possibilities of game music implementation. 

This unit explores improvisatory practice across a wide range of musical traditions, spanning Western Art music from the Renaissance through to contemporary works, Indian classical music, jazz, Afro-Cuban, and other popular styles. You’lldevelop your understanding of improvisation through fundamental rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic concepts, supported by online modules examining the theoretical systems used to analyse improvised music, alongside developments in popular musicology that address cultural questions of gender, race, and protest. 

This unit traces jazz performance and composition from 1900 to the present, examining pivotal figures, repertoire, and creative practices within their historical and sociological contexts. You’ll develop skills in harmonic analysis, compositional technique, and arranging across jazz styles, with dedicated attention to Australian jazz artists and composers and their relationship to the wider jazz tradition. 

This unit introduces you to the theoretical foundations of music pedagogy and their application in practice, developing practical strategies for teaching across a variety of settings. 

This unit examines the impact of globalisation on music, exploring how musical ideas and influences travel across cultures and countries while interrogating the role of Western hegemony in the globalised present. Through lectures, discussion, listening, and assessment tasks, you’ll engage with theories of cultural identity and survival, consider the conflicts globalisation has produced, and develop your ability to analyse and interpret musical elements across a diverse range of repertoires, including music’s function as an intercultural communicative tool. 

This unit gives you the opportunity to propose, research, and present an independent project on a musical or music business topic of your choosing, with presentation formats ranging from a podcast series and extended research essay to a lecture-demonstration, short film, or other approved medium. Weekly group sessions with a faculty member provide space to workshop proposals, drafts, assessment tasks, presentation skills, and advanced research and writing techniques.