About San Francisco Film School
San Francisco Film School is a nationally accredited institution educating artists and technologists in film, music, and sound. Since its inception, our school has been dedicated to the reimagination of the art school model, and to building a more creative and powerful education environment.
Our school nurtures the aspiring creative’s aesthetic spark while providing the critical hands-on training necessary to have a successful career in the creative arts and new technologies. This conviction now extends beyond film to the disciplines reshaping how the world hears, including game audio, spatial sound, music production, and interactive media.
Why Emerging Audio Technology?
Audio is becoming interactive. Games, apps, virtual and augmented reality, installations, and live intermedia performance all depend on sound that responds: to a player’s decision, a listener’s position, a performer’s gesture. Designing that sound, and making it behave, is a distinct craft with its own tools, techniques, and ways of thinking. This program teaches it from the ground up.
No prior experience is required. The curriculum assumes nothing on day one and holds nothing back after that. Over five semesters, students move from the physics of sound to building adaptive audio systems inside game engines, composing music that rearranges itself around the player, placing sound precisely in three-dimensional space, and performing original intermedia work for a live audience.
Graduates are prepared for roles including:
- Game Audio Designer
- Technical Sound Designer
- Audio Implementation Specialist
- XR Audio Developer (VR, AR, and MR)
- Spatial Audio Engineer
- Procedural Audio Designer
- Adaptive Music Composer
- Installation Sound Artist
Earn Your Associate of Science Degree
The Associate of Science in Emerging Audio Technology is a 60-credit degree completed in five semesters over 20 months. Students are eligible to apply for Federal Financial Aid, and 529 College Savings Plans may be used for this program.
The Program
The degree is organized as five twelve-credit semesters, each with a clear center of gravity: foundations, sound design and production, game audio and interactivity, spatial and immersive audio, and advanced applications and career launch. Every course is hands-on and project-based, and every semester adds finished work to a growing professional portfolio, so graduates leave with proof of what they can do, not just a transcript that says they learned it.
The program is offered two ways. In-Person students attend classes on campus in San Francisco. Hybrid students complete the majority of their coursework online from wherever they live. Both formats follow the same curriculum with the same faculty, and both include one Residency Week each semester: five days of concentrated, hands-on work built around equipment, spaces, and collaborators assembled for that week.
Residency Weeks escalate as the program does. Students begin with professional acoustic measurement and critical listening environments, move through collaborative composition and intensive middleware and game engine implementation, then develop for XR hardware on professional spatial audio systems. The final residency stages a public or recorded performance of original intermedia work, where music, sound, and visuals run as one live system.
Every student receives a personal equipment package early in the program and keeps it during school and after graduation: a MacBook Pro, a professional audio interface with studio headphones, a MIDI controller, an industry-standard dynamic microphone, and a VR headset for spatial audio development and testing. Software includes a permanent license for Ableton Live Suite along with Pro Tools, Logic Pro, and the game engines and audio middleware used across the industry. Every tool required to complete the program is in the package or provided by the school; there is nothing else to buy.
The curriculum takes new tools as seriously as established ones. Students work directly with AI-enhanced audio production, learning where these systems genuinely strengthen the work, where they fall short, and how to keep creative judgment at the center of every decision.
Whether the destination is a game studio, an XR team, a spatial audio house, or work that does not have a job title yet, the program builds the technical fluency, the portfolio, and the judgment to get there.