Sound Recording PhD | Doctorate / PhD | Art & Design | On Campus | 48 months | University of Surrey | United Kingdom

Since the Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR) was created in 1998, it has become known internationally as a leading centre for research in psychoacoustic engineering, with world-class facilities and significant funding from research councils and industry. We’re interested in human perceptions of audio quality, particularly of high-fidelity music signals. Overall perceived quality depends, at least in part, on perception of lower-level timbral and spatial attributes such as brightness, warmth, locatedness and envelopment. In turn, these attributes depend on acoustic parameters such as frequency spectrum and inter-aural cross-correlation coefficient. Using a combination of acoustic measurement and human listening tests, we are exploring the connections between acoustic parameters and perceived timbral and spatial attributes, and also between these perceptual attributes and overall quality and listener preference. From our findings we are developing mathematical and computational models of human auditory perception, and engineering perceptually-motivated audio tools.