Prof Bill Davies
| Research Interests | I’m the Director of LAURA, with research interests in aural diversity, soundscape and acoustics. For almost all humans, sound is a crucial part of our lives. We move through environments surrounded by sound, using it to communicate, understand, navigate, appreciate. Reducing noise pollution and enhancing positive soundscapes are crucial efforts to improve the quality of our lives. Much of this is under-appreciated and under-researched. Aural diversity is a good example – we are only starting to understand the complexity and character of many individual and group differences in hearing and response to sound. My PhD was in auditorium acoustics, and during that I became very interested in what was then called ‘subjective response’ – what changes can people hear in the acoustics of a room and why does one room sound better than another? This led to a series of projects in psychoacoustics, on the perception of pitch, reverberation, space, speech and bass and on everyday sound. My students and I have developed models of multidimensional pitch, salience and spaciousness in reproduced sound. In the last 20 years, much of my work has been through the paradigm of the soundscape, which seeks to capture and explain the entirety of human response to complex sound environments. This has necessitated developing complex models and interdisciplinary methodologies. I led the Positive Soundscape Project. This produced a novel system to assess soundscapes; the first neurological validation of soundscape assessment scales; a concept and method for soundscape simulation; a special issue of the journal Applied Acoustics; and an influential demonstration of interdisciplinary research in acoustics. Soundscape work since then has included development of soundscape synthesis and composition in different modalities (including AR & VR) and critiques of listening models. I have applied soundscape thinking to research in other areas of acoustics and audio. In spatial audio, I led work on perception of complex auditory scenes on the project S3A: Future Spatial Audio. This produced new findings on object-based sound perception which were incorporated in project outputs like the VISR production tools, the VR film The Turning Forest and the BBC’s ongoing work in Media Device Orchestration. In signal processing, I led perceptual work on the Making Sense of Sounds project. We developed a dataset of everyday sounds, a new taxonomy of everyday sound perception and used this to improve machine listening systems. However, John Drever’s aural diversity concept has forced me to re-evaluate. In most of the work outlined above, we collected responses from several people and then averaged them in some way to produce a group response. Individual and sub-group differences were hidden. Sometimes we worked with people with a specific hearing impairment, but usually we sought participants with ‘normal hearing’, and so excluded everyone else. (In this, we were of course following disciplinary norms – all subjects connected with sound have done this to date.) Aural diversity now seeks to replace the binary normal/impaired medical model of hearing to a model which encompasses the very many hearing (and listening) differences between individuals and groups. This opens up a huge range of research possibilities, and challenges many disciplines (acoustics, music, psychology, etc.) to change their thinking. I’m excited by all aural diversity research, but as an autistic researcher I have a particular interest in how autistic people process sound. I’m always happy to hear from prospective PhD students, postdocs & collaborators who would like to work on similar topics. |
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| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |
| PhD Topics | Soundscape, aural diversity, psychoacoustics, room acoustics, environmental noise, spatial audio, sound quality, acoustics |