An exciting research project is under way at UCL at Here East, based in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. Principal investigator, Professor Jian Kang, is leading a group of seven researchers to study soundscapes within an ERC Advanced Grant. Specifically, the team is looking to better understand, measure, and ultimately control soundscapes. To do this, the team at UCL worked with HHB Communications to design a studio that could be used to accurately reproduce and study the recordings the research team has captured.
“Working with educational institutions is always an exciting challenge for our team”, comments CTO John Johnson. “The parameters for rooms intended for research tend to be different from that of music or post production studios. Ensuring the room meets the needs of the research team is paramount to the entire HHB team.”
Environment and building acoustics expert, Professor Kang, and his team are conducting research around soundscapes, defined in this research as requiring human perception, creating a need to study and understand how a human perceives, and is impacted by, the surrounding sonic environment. The UCL team has spent the last year gathering recordings from all around the world from multiple different environments. To best study these recordings as soundscapes the team needed a studio that would be able to precisely recreate the recorded environment. To do this an immersive listening room was built and outfitted.
Now finished, the room hosts twelve Genelec 8331 SAM™ three-way coaxial monitors set up on trusses, allowing them to be moved a
round as the research requires. The room is also Dante® enabled with the DAD AX32 router which helps to simplify the reproduction of spatially accurate sonic environments, regardless of reproduction format. While the room was designed for the soundscape research team, this unique and flexible set up can be used for a wide variety of other applications, from sound design to music or post-production.
“The team at HHB worked with UCL to recommend a studio solution to meet the lab’s academic needs then monitored the delivery and installation process,” said Professor Kang.
“Now the listening lab at Here East is available for the team to conduct research as well as offer students the ability to work with immersive audio.”
