Q&A: Ieva Vaiti

What was your introduction to music?

My mum is a classical pianist and she works at a conservatoire in Lithuania, so we always used to go to concerts together, but the big moment for me was watching an orchestra on TV and thinking the violinist was really cool! So from the age of the six, I trained classically as a violinist.

I then attended the Purcell school in England, which was where I got into music technology. I studied it at A Level, at age sixteen and the fascination I'd always had for music production came to the forefront. My teacher was really supportive of me doing music technology, sound engineering and composition. I had no idea that women were so underrepresented in this aspect of the industry, so I was going into it quite blind at first. My teacher explained the situation to me, how it was a male-dominated area, but told me that I shouldn't feel discouraged by that. I was lucky to have someone that supported me in that way. He would listen to what I'd done and give me feedback, which really helped me getting into Guildhall. If I didn't have that support, I would have done a lot of the work totally alone, there aren't a lot of educational recourses on music production out there.

What lead you to teach the course?

It came about from a conversation I had with Mike Roberts, the head of electronic music at Guildhall, while I was a student there. We spoke at length with other female students about what we could do to improve the gender imbalance. At my first year at Guildhall, I was the only girl on my whole course, and in my second year there was only two of us!

I thought that if we gave girls an education at an early age, teaching them about production and engineering in a safe space, it would give them the courage to pursue it later in life. They just wouldn't think, ‘Oh its's just a boys club and I won't have anyone to hang out with at uni.’

Had any of the students studied music tech before?

Pretty much all of them have a musical background — whether it's jazz or singing, but in terms of production they are pretty new to it, so it's nice to be the one who introduces them to the technical elements and also the creative tasks. After she had completed the course, one of the girls said that she wanted to produce music for video games, and I thought that was just brilliant!

Would you say that the music industry is becoming more inclusive?

There's way more awareness of [the gender imbalance] then there used to be, lots of companies are making changes, for example, they'll have funding for women in music. When I work as a sound engineer now, there's less of a competitive energy – it's become a welcoming and encouraging environment. It can feel patronising sometimes when people say, ‘it's so nice to have a female composer’, but it's a good thing that they think about that now, rather than just ignoring the gender ratio in a studio. It's definitely going in the right direction.

Is technology changing music teaching for the better?

I think there are two arguments for that. In a way, technology is great for education as it makes it so accessible, I find when I've been to primary schools to give workshops, instead of overwhelming a complete beginner with a violin, it's better to focus on the result, like giving them a button to press that creates a sound. In this sense, technology does make for more accessible materials and is conducive to self-teaching. But I can also understand why some teachers prefer the more traditional style of doing things. Acoustic instruments really are important, and to fully understand your craft, you need to carry on with them.