Salford uni team secures £1.6m research boost

A team that includes engineers from the University of Salford has secured multi-million pound funding to pursue research into making better use of sound recordings.

The minds behind the project, which has received a £1.6m boost from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), believe the research could help archivists, sound artists, musicians, educators and the creators of radio and television programmes more easily find the sounds they need.

Called Making Sense of Sounds, the research will build on work already carried out in the S3A project, a collaborative effort between the EPSRC, the BBC and the universities of Salford, Southampton and Surrey.

From January next year, the University of Salford’s Professor Trevor Cox and Dr Bill Davies, among others, will seek ways to convert audio recordings into actionable information.

Dr Davies, a senior lecturer in acoustics at the university, said: “Increasing quantities of sound data are being gathered in the home, at work and on digital platforms.

“For example, The British Library Sound Archive has over 1m discs and thousands of tapes; the BBC has some 1m hours of digitized content; and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.”

He continued: “However, the ability to understand and interact with all this sound data is hampered by a lack of tools allowing people to ‘make sense of sounds’ based on the audio content, so our work will investigate and develop new signal processing methods to analyse sound and audiovisual files and new interaction methods to search and browse through sets of sound files.”

The Making Sense of Sounds project is led by the University of Surrey’s Professor Mark Plumbley.