SFCM Welcomes Marc Senasac, Leading Bay Area Audio Engineer, to TAC

SFCM prides itself on creating musicians who can carve their own path in the music world, so who better than someone whose work spans from thrash metal to Sony and Meta?

Marc Senasac, long a fixture in the Bay Area music community, helped launch the Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) program at SFCM in 2015. Though a role change at Sony Computer Entertainment America took him away from SFCM directly, he says, "I'm always in touch and aware of what's going on: I've visited the Conservatory campus many times, sometimes for performances, sometimes to be a part of the Sony Project even if I wasn't directly participating."

Senasac is returning to SFCM to teach TAC 440: Audio for Emerging Media, which covers spatial audio and virtual, augmented, and so-called "mixed reality." Moving on from Sony, Senasac says he joined Meta because of their work in those areas, but he considers video game audio—a cornerstone of the TAC program—as exemplifying the "emerging" part of the course.

"Video game players demand being on the front edge of their medium's technology—audio included—versus film, radio, and traditional recordings. Those are established production pipelines, but the video game pipeline is always changing."

As far as how the course will proceed, Senasac says he's preserving the approach of beginning with the basics of how recorded music has created or treated the idea of "space" in music, starting with mono mixes. "Then we proceed to stereo, and continue down the relevant media timeline all the way to AR and VR," he explains.

Senasac says grounding the "emerging" aspect of the class within established concepts like mono and stereo provides a firm base as the spatial audio and AR/VR continue to evolve: "It's a given that Apple or whoever will come out with new iterations of that technology, but those fundamentals are always going to support whatever the next twist in emerging media is."

In a constantly-evolving industry like music production, Senasac wants to highlight that he's teaching these aspects of the craft from a creator-first perspective. "The tools are always getting better and more accessible, and there will always be third-party interests—software or tech companies—pushing something new. How do we weed through that? Well, first, by going back to the fundamentals: How this new thing works within the context of what's come before, and how it's relevant to the creators—rather than the consumers."

Browsing Senasac's technical credits is a wild ride, involving artists like 2Pac, dancehall icon Beenie Man, surf rock pioneer Dick Dale, "Don't Fear the Reaper" legends Blue Öyster Cult, '90s R&B stars En Vogue, and indie rockers Kasabian. He also has a slate of AAA video games—like God of War: Ascension, Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us—attached to his name, and even made history with Journey, the first-ever video game soundtrack to win the Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media GRAMMY Award in 2012. 

But one name pops out consistently in Senasac's discography: Bay Area thrash metal icons Exodus, who, despite not being a household name, are revered as pioneers in the genre. (Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett co-founded the band in 1979.)

"I was an assistant-slash-kind-of 'gofer' person at first at this studio owned by Sandy Pearlman, who produced Blue Öyster Cult and the Clash," Senasac recalls, "and he owned this studio on Hyde Street, The Automatt, which was very top-of-the-line, had a ton of gear. Leslie Ann Jones, who's now at Skywalker Sound and visits the Conservatory a lot, worked there for a time."

"This was pretty early in the metal scene. Kirk was there with the Exodus guys—Metallica's big, they had just done Master of Puppets, but they weren't as big as they'd become—and the guys from Primus were hanging out. Everybody knew each other; it was a great place to work. And actually, on that Exodus record, Pleasures of the Flesh, Sylvia Massy was assistant engineer. And then she goes to LA and just happens to help out with this band called Tool. Who knew?"

Senasac says his discography is just a result of his approach to work. "My career is my career because I kept showing up. There's a lot of attrition in this industry: People stop showing up, but I kept at it. I never expected I would have the arc that I went on."

"At one point, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go see what was going on with the Sony Playstation. And I said, 'No way. Not in a million years. Video games suck. The audio quality is zero.' That was me putting myself first. But fortunately, I showed up and checked it out."

Learn more about studying Technology and Applied Composition at SFCM.