Augmented Sonic Reality

The sounds and noises of our urban landscapes provide the artist with a fertile resource with which to reflect society back at itself. By listening to these noises with greater scrutiny we can gain a better understanding of our environment and insights into possible futures.

In addition, urban landscapes are awash with hidden noises, such as network and communication data, subsonic and ultrasonic frequencies, radio signals, electromagnetic fields and the transitory data noise of its inhabitants.

This PhD will involve artist-led, and practice-based research and development into ways in which listeners can create personal, interactive and immersive mobile sound art experiences, or interactive soundscapes. It is proposed that these interactive soundscapes could enhance perceptions of interior and exterior urban environments and provide insights into, and a more accurate document of, our contemporary urban landscapes.

Detailed research will be undertaken into ways of effectively capturing and processing environmental and personal data sources for the purpose of its sonification and inclusion within the soundscape.

It is also envisaged that this project will involve the research and development of a wearable audio and data capturing interface that would facilitate an accessible and mobile audio experience. Such an interface could incorporate binaural recording and monitoring, along with environmental sensing and smartphone technologies.

Increasing the granularity of the data and the fidelity of the audio captured would build significantly on previous work in this area, expanding options relating to data mapping, processing and sonification, and resulting in a more detailed soundscape.

The personal sound art creation and performance experience that this project potentially offers, also offers exciting opportunities for the generation of new musical encounters. The empowerment of the listener as performer and the embracing of ambient noise are considered key compositional elements in the realisation of such new musical experiences.

We intend the Horizon CDT to be the place where partners come to find their future employees and to engage with the opportunities and challenges of digital identity and personal data. The key beneficiaries of our research will be:

- Commercial private sector companies that will engage with our CDT students during their research and/or employ them after graduation. Our partners include companies developing digital identity technologies as well as user companies across a range of sectors (consumer goods, entertainment, transportation, energy and others).

- Public sector and third sector organisations that are concerned with the use of digital identities to support civil society including broadcasters, healthcare providers and campaign groups.

- The public whose personal data forms the focus of their research and who will ultimately use and come to depend upon digital identities.

- Research communities spanning computer science, engineering, psychology, sociology, business and humanities.

These will benefit in various ways.

- Commercial, public and third sector companies will benefit from being able to recruit from a pool of talented PhD graduates who bring an in-depth understanding of digital identity and a proven ability to work in interdisciplinary teams. They will also benefit from being able to participate in co-creation of PhD research to ensure focus on relevant challenges and be able to exploit results of this PhD research.

- The public will benefit through a greater understanding of the opportunities and challenges of digital identity.

- Research communities will benefit by opening up promising new interdisciplinary fields.

Our Impact activities will be driven by Professor Derek McAuley, the Director of Horizon, who has a track record of establishing industry labs, spinning our companies and who is currently acting CIO of the TSB funded Connected Digital Economy Hub. Key activities will be:

- All Horizon PhDs will be carried out in collaboration with an external partner who will be involved in drawing up the initial topic, recruiting students, shaping the PhD proposal, supervision, and hosting at least one internship

- We will continue to organise knowledge exchange events within Horizon that are open to our network of over 100 external partners, including our annual Horizon Research Conference.

- We will encourage the release of applications, open source software, and open datasets wherever collaboration agreements allow.

- We will actively encourage our students to spin-out new ventures, including providing seedcorn funding through Horizon.

- We will engage our students with our two partner catapults, the Connected Digital Economy Catapult and the Satellite Applications Catapult.

- We will actively encourage industry visits through guest lectures on our "Broadening Horizons" core taught programme.

- We will also encourage companies to define, steer and sponsor the first year interdisciplinary team projects.

- Our students will complete a module on Public and External Engagement and are encouraged to engage in public events and exhibitions.

- Horizon's journalist-in-residence will help expose students research to the wider world through regular blogposts, while the University's marketing and communications team will help them develop press releases.

- We will provide training in research publication as part of the Professional Skills module and mentor publications through the Practice Led Project and the annual writing retreat (where students present and critique draft papers).

These impact activities will be supported by a professional online presence with posters, demos and podcasts made available through our website and associated YouTube channel and twitter feed, and with individual PhD profiles being posted on our own site and on external networking portals such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate.