Projects

Explore Sustainable Sound Futures PhD projects within our Centre for Doctoral Training, bringing together researchers from the Universities of Salford, Bristol, Sheffield, and Southampton. Combining expertise across science, engineering, design, and the social sciences, our projects harness the power of sound to create meaningful real-world impact. All projects are funded by EPSRC and our industry partners.

Cohort 1 of the EPSRC Sustainable Sound Futures CDT gathered for a group photo indoors around a large anatomical ear model used for sound and hearing research.

Physics-informed Machine Inference for Vibro-acoustics

Project outline Large numerical simulations dominate marine and aerospace industries when performing structural analysis on engineering platforms. These models are computationally intensive, and model updating often requires complete re-simulation. To enable practical real-time sensing applications for noise and vibration, sufficient sensor coverage is needed to acquire the data which characterises the dynamical behaviour for quantifying […]

Physics-informed Machine Learning for Acoustic Simulations

Project outline Numerical methods for acoustic simulations are well established, but scale poorly to high frequencies and large domains. Important applications include simulation of outdoor noise propagation and room acoustics. Physics-informed machine learning is a new and rapidly developing field that has shown promising early results in other physical sciences, and offers significant potential for […]

Optimising Air Source Heat Pump Planning and Placement to Minimise Community Noise Impact

Project outline Air source heat pumps (ASHPs) offer a significant opportunity to decarbonise home heating. However, the increasing rate of installations at homes across the UK and Europe may lead to a rise in community noise, impacting public health and wellbeing, and potentially hindering the adoption of heat pumps. Current standards for assessing noise from […]

Investigating Neighbour Noise through a Mixed-methods Approach to Understand Human Perception and Response

Project outline A given acoustic environment may consist of numerous individual sound sources with varying acoustic qualities, yet humans can intuitively separate sounds originating from different sources. Prior research has suggested that sources perceived as dominant within a soundscape play a significant role in overall soundscape perception (for example, if the dominant sound sources are […]

Evaluation of Complex Acoustic Environments Using Sound Source Separation Methods

Developing Methods for Addressing the Impacts of Anthropogenic Noise on Non-Human Animals During Development Planning

Project outline Noise is highlighted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the second most harmful environmental pollutant with a growing body of evidence demonstrating its negative impacts on human health. UK policy and guidance prescribes acceptable noise levels, manages noise as a statutory nuisance and regulates noise-intensive activities via licensing. However, there is limited […]

Coupled Volume Design Approaches to Auditoria for Classical Music: Perceptual Evaluation and Computational Modelling

Project outline Cultural venues such as concert halls and opera houses provide significant socio-economic benefits to the communities they serve. They are often landmark buildings for a city or region, offering shared spaces for connection and artistic expression, and supporting the creative economy. The success of such venues is determined in part by the quality […]

Investigating the Impact of Noise on Cognitive Function, and How Hearing Technology can be used to Recover Performance

Project outline This project aims to develop our understanding of how noise impacts cognitive functioning, for example as measured by the change in a listener’s ability to perform a task in the presence of noise. Of particular interest is how the acoustic properties of noise impact our everyday thinking and productivity by consuming sensory and […]

Bio-inspired Auditory Models

Project outline This project aims to develop AI models inspired by the auditory system for improved auditory scene analysis. While recent advances in machine learning have produced numerous acoustic AI models for various auditory tasks, these models typically adapt architectures from computer vision or natural language processing. This cross-domain borrowing often results in models that […]

Auralisation of Acoustic Metamaterials

Project outline This project aims to develop virtual models to simulate and assess how humans perceive sound altered by acoustic metamaterials across different applications (such as absorptive treatments and noise mitigation), and to develop an interactive web app that demonstrates the sound of acoustic metamaterials through auralisation. The emergence of acoustic metamaterials has opened up […]