Congratulations to Professor Jack Kelly, winner of the 2025–2026 Teaching Award in the Part-Time Category!
Since joining the Schulich School of Music as an Assistant Professor in 2023, Jack Kelly (Ph.D. ’23, M.Mus. ’16) has drawn on his extensive skills as a researcher and working audio engineer to create an invigorating and encouraging environment for his students in Sound Recording and Music Technology.
As a teacher, Jack is guided by a desire to “break complex perceptual and technical processes into structured, manageable challenges,” which he augments with hands-on experiences, such taking students out of the classroom to conduct field recording sessions. Students have described him as “a fantastic professor” who provides “a safe, healthy, nurturing, and inclusive learning environment for all students,” and someone who “helps us feel prepared for professional work” and enables students to “become more confident in both technical skills and creative decisions.”
Read on to learn more about Jack’s teaching practice, his hopes for his students, and how research and pedagogy have intermingled in his career.
How have your musical and professional experiences shaped your teaching?
I came up through the work itself, as an audio engineer and someone who’s spent a lot of time in studios trying to understand not just how things sounded but why they sounded that way. That experience gave me a deep respect for the difference between knowing something technically and actually hearing it. You can read about the Fletcher-Munson curves, or understand psychoacoustics on paper, but developing the ear to feel it in real material... that takes time, repetition, and focused attention. My teaching is really an attempt to bridge this gap for students by giving them the frameworks and the practice opportunities to build real perceptual fluency, not just theoretical knowledge.
Can you share any examples of innovative or unconventional teaching methods you've used recently that have resonated well with your students?
One thing I’ve been developing is having students build the tools they use. In one course, students with minimal programming experience work through building a functional audio plugin from the ground up. The point isn’t to produce software engineers; it’s so that, when you’ve had to make decisions about why a compressor works the way it does for instance, you hear compression differently. You stop treating the tools as black boxes and start having real conversations with them. I’ve also been integrating AI music generation tools into critical listening work. Not to celebrate them uncritically, but to use them as a kind of mirror. When students listen carefully to AI-generated material and have to articulate what’s working, what’s missing, and why it matters, they’re forced to crystallize what they actually value about craft and intentionality in music. That’s proven to be a surprisingly generative conversation.
What do you hope your students take away — musically, professionally, or personally — from your courses?
Honestly, I hope they take away a relationship with their own perception that doesn’t depend on any particular tool or industry structure remaining stable. The landscape they’re entering is genuinely uncertain, and I’d be doing them a disservice if I pretended otherwise. What I can give them is something more durable than software skills: the ability to hear carefully, to evaluate critically, and to articulate why something works or doesn’t with authority and specificity. Beyond that, I hope they leave with some sense of being a thoughtful practitioner. Someone who takes craft seriously and stays curious about the physics and psychology of sound. It is a worthwhile way to move through the world, regardless of what the industry looks like in ten years. The students who I think will find their footing are the ones who’ve internalized that, not just accumulated credentials.
What advice would you give to your first-year-at-university self?
Spend less time trying to figure out what you’re supposed to become and more time getting genuinely good at the things that fascinate you. I spent energy early on managing how I appeared, whether I fit the profile, whether I was on the right track, when I would have been better served just going deeper into the work itself. The expertise that ended up mattering most came from following curiosity past the point where it was comfortable or practical.
Also: learn to listen before you learn to fix. That applies to audio and to most other things!
