Research theme: Acoustics

In the Acoustics and Audio Group, one of our core research areas is acoustics itself, or the scientific study of mechanical vibrations and sound. Some areas of specialisation include:

Musical Acoustics: We study the functioning of musical instruments, from both theoretical and experimental standpoints. We have studied virtually all instrument types, from brass to stringed instruments and percussion, including historical musical instruments in conjunction with our partners at St. Cecilia’s Museum of Historical Musical Instruments.

Architectural and Room Acoustics: Some of our work has been geared towards problems in very large scale wave-based room acoustics modelling. See the Audio Signal Processing page. We also analyse the many interactions in small but complex rooms, such as coupled rooms and room transitions.

Hearing and Transducer Design: We model, fabricate, and evaluate acoustic transducer designs using micro-electro-mechanical systems techniques (MEMS). Recent work has sought to incorporate ultra-thin graphene-based membranes into millimetre-scale transducers.