interview
Julia Petukchova
Graduate of Sound Design Institute
Yulia completed her training in electronic music writing at the Sound Design Institte in 2020. She kindly agreed to share her emotions and impressions about her studies, tell us how her life has changed and why she chose us
For me, the choice of educational institution was quite obvious. Sound Design Institute was recommended to me by a friend who met Vasily Filatov at the DevGamm Conference. He had studied everything about the Institute, and he wanted to come here. He himself is from the gaming industry, a computer game writer, and has been more closely associated with music in his life than I have.
It's important to understand how to write music, regardless of the purpose
I only studied music as a child, and returned to it a year ago after a 15-year break. When I was thinking about training, I already knew that this was the place that I could come. There were two main reasons for my choice. First, I liked that here you can choose the main direction, but still master a wide range of knowledge. Secondly, the training takes a year. As a person who had several degrees, I wanted to quickly get the necessary knowledge and start applying it. I chose the program "writing music" because I thought it's important to get compositional skills first. It's important to understand how to write music, regardless of what it's for. Basic knowledge could be applied to any field, whether it's movies, games, or own tracks.

I am a computer linguist. First I studied natural languages, then programming languages, and this became my main occupation. Music is more of a hobby for me now, but I work on my portfolio in my spare time. Globally, there is a goal to change the profession by the age of 40 and completely switch to music. I dream of sitting in my old age and writing tracks from anywhere in the world or on the ocean.

For me, the most emotional day was the day of the interview. I thought for a very long time whether to enroll or not, and came just a couple of days before the end of the set. Not prepared in any way I came running with the words: "I really want to write music, I don't know how, but I really want to." Just a few days later, school started, and on the first day of school, everyone sat with bated breath and listened to Vasily, the founder and main curator.
There was a feeling that all the doors are open to you, if you knock correctly
At the beginnig of studing almost everything seemed complicated to me.
Before the start of training, I had never opened a program for writing music, and it was quite difficult to keep up with everyone who already knew something at least a little.
Everything was completely new to me. It was easier for me in some humanitarian things. Vasily says constantly that a story is imporant part of music composing. It was always close to me, because my education was philological and I was used to writing stories, but now I had to do it through sound.

One of the most memorable moments for me was the group work on the voice-over for the video. We created voice-over from different sounds, using only voice , and the results were amazing. The usual sounds we utter every day make something unusual.

There were many insights throughout my studies. We often touched on important topics in lectures with Ilya Tsvetkov, talked not only about how to become a musician, but also about how to maintain yourself in this state. There was a feeling that all the doors are open to you, if you knock correctly.
Don't put your dream on hold
I find it quite difficult to start making money right away with the skills that you just got. So now I'm gaining experience and enjoying the process of creating music.
I set myself several goals, for example, to create a page on SoundCloud and load tracks. That I did, actually. My pseudonym is Avvrik.
I also plan to create my own work page in Vkontakte, which will be my business card, and then my website. Now I'm recording sound on set, I even bought some equipment for this, and I will work on the sound in the film. I want to write my own music there, I hope that it will be inserted. The main advice I can give you is to start now if you want to. Don't put your dream on hold.