I am…
Flora, 26 years old, originally from Carinthia, and resident in Vienna for nearly seven years now.
What I study at the mdw…
I’ve been in the Tonmeister Studies programme since 2017.
My favourite place at the mdw is…
On the wooden loungers in the courtyard, where I’ve caught more than a few sunny naps during exhausted midday breaks. We spend an incredible amount of time in dark studios in my programme, so I feel an urgent need to balance that out with sunlight.
How does a Tonmeister student’s everyday life at the university shape up?
We’ve had the BA/MA structure in place since this autumn, but I’m still in the old diploma curriculum. My first six semesters were time-consuming and challenging, with a school-like class schedule. There wasn’t much time for independent work outside of the projects we did in class, which was a shame. The content we cover is extremely broad—from ear training and music theory to electrical engineering and acoustics and on to hands-on studio subjects like pop production, classical producing, and film sound. But the new curriculum provides more options to specialise and go in-depth earlier in one’s studies, and hence more project-based work.
You’ve already been part of major Austrian film productions like Feminism WTF (2023), Stams (2023), Matter Out Of Place (2022), and What a Feeling (2024): How do you reconcile projects like those with your studies, and how did you wind up participating in them in the first place?
The fact is, working on such projects alongside your studies is just impossible—at least in the old curriculum. That’s why I’ll be four semesters over the minimum duration of study when I finish my degree this autumn—which is actually a good bit faster than average!
I ended up doing these big projects through the recording studio The Grand Post, which offered me an internship when I went there to mix a short film. That was the start of what’s developed into a very good working relationship over the past three years, with lots of great projects.
