Category Archives: Research

Prof Murray Campbell receives Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics from the ASA

We are delighted to announce that Prof Murray Campbell of the Acoustics and Audio Group has recently been the recipient of the Acoustical Society of America’s “Silver Medal” award. Murray is a founding member of the University of Edinburgh’s Acoustics and Audio Group (formerly the Acoustics and Fluid Mechanics group), and has been cited for his major and longstanding “contributions to understanding the acoustics of brass wind instruments“. Murray is now a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

The Acoustical Society of America was set up in 1929 to generate, disseminate, and promote the knowledge and practical applications of acoustics. The Society, which is a founding member of the American Institute of Physics, recognizes outstanding achievement in acoustics with several awards.

The Silver Medal is presented to individuals for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles, or through research accomplishments in acoustics.

Prof Campbell works with colleagues in the Audio and Acoustics Group on the physics and acoustics of musical instruments. This award recognizes the international reputation which the University of Edinburgh has acquired as a centre of research into the physics of brass wind musical instruments, and is a tribute to the contributions made by many PhD students who have worked in this field over the last three decades.

Prof Campbell was presented with the Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego in December 2019. The citation reviewed his professional accomplishments, and concluded:

“Murray Campbell is a world-renowned acoustician, one of the most productive researchers in the field of musical acoustics, and has been a mentor to countless young scientists. His work is of the highest caliber, and his kindness and generosity are legendary in the community. Awarding Murray Campbell the Silver Medal is a deserved recognition of his may contributions to the advancement of our understanding of music and musical instruments, as well as his dedication to the development and education of the next generation of acousticians.”

See also: News item on the School of Physics and Astronomy website.

Dr Brian Hamilton wins new start-up award for room acoustics simulator

Dr. Brian Hamilton, of the Acoustics and Audio Group, has won one of the Scottish Edge “Wild Card Edge” awards, for funding to support a new start-up venture called Roomerical.

Roomerical is the result of an ERC-funded project WRAM (Wave Based Room Acoustics Modeling), concerned with state of the art architectural acoustics simulation.

Many congratulations to Brian, who is certainly on a roll of award successes of late!

Success at Edinburgh start up festival for AAG researcher and alumni

There was more success for AAG entrepreneurs last night, at the Edinburgh Start Up Festival 2017 (everything in Edinburgh is, in the end, a festival).

This festival is organised by the University of Edinburgh Business School, and “offers students and entrepreneurs a space to imagine their future by opening up conversation through talks, panels and activities designed to entertain, encourage and inspire”.

Dr Brian Hamilton, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the AAG funded by the ERC, won first prize in the “Novel Ideas” category, for his work on large scale architectural acoustic simulations. Meanwhile, recent AMT MSc graduate Raimundo Gonzalez came runner up in the “Venture Development” category, for his ongoing work in new methods for binaural rendering on mobile platforms – a system known as BinauraVR.

It was an exciting night all round for researchers and students connected to Edinburgh College of Art, who had a hand in half of the prizes on offer.

It all goes to show what an exciting place Edinburgh is for startup action at the moment. This seems to be especially true in the area of audio and acoustic tech connected to the AAG and AMT MSc, as we have reported numerous times on these pages (e.g. here, here, here, and here).

Major new ERC funding awarded to Acoustics and Audio Group

Researchers in the Acoustics and Audio Group have been awarded prestigious funding through the European Research Council’s Proof of Concept Scheme. The ERC Proof of Concept scheme is open to current principal investigators of ERC-funded projects.waves-450

The new project, entitled WRAM: Wave-based Room Acoustics Modeling follows on from work under the ERC NESS Project (Next Generation Sound Synthesis), which is a joint project which has been running between the Edinburgh College of Art and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre since 2012, and led by Dr. Stefan Bilbao, of the Reid School of Music.

The NESS Project has been concerned with large-scale simulation-based sound synthesis on parallel hardware. Part of this work, led by NESS Project member Dr. Brian Hamilton, has been concerned with very large-scale simulations of room acoustics, with the goal of very high quality auralisation of virtual spaces in 3D. Under WRAM, the joint work of Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Bilbao (PI) will be developed further with an eye towards commercialisation in the area of architectural acoustics and the auralisation of virtual spaces. The project will break ground in December 2016, and runs until June, 2018.

Acoustics & fluid mechanics demo videos

We have recently added a new playlist to our AAG YouTube channel. It’s for cool demonstration videos of acoustics and fluid mechanics in action. The first video is now up, and involves high speed footage of water spouts being generated in the new FloWave wave tank facility at the University of Edinburgh. Filmed and edited by Prof Clive Greated of the Acoustics and Audio Group. The playlist is embedded below.

New MusICA Seminar posted – Chris Chafe of CCRMA

The Acoustics and Audio Group were privileged to host Prof Chris Chafe, the director of CCRMA (Stanford University), for a week long research trip last month.

Chris was kind enough to give a seminar as part of our MusICA series, on the topics of data sonification and `musification’. It was an entertaining and insightful talk, and is now available to watch again via our MusICA archive.