A new PhD scholarship is available within the AXD team.

Creating audio that convincingly represents sounds in a 3D space has now started to infiltrate the commercial landscape. Headphones, videogames and cinema are all vying to generate some level of spatialisation and immersion for the listener. The goal of this PhD project is to understand how individual differences (e.g. ear morphology) can affect the perception of spatial and immersive audio by developing an objective experimental approach through the recording and analysis of brain activity via electroencephalography, pupillometry and behaviour. Ultimately this multidisciplinary project will deepen our understanding of how to design and reproduce a realistic and immersive virtual sound space.

This project aims to:

1.Develop objective experimental paradigms using EEG/pupillometry recordings to identify differences in neural activity when exposed to personalised and non-personalised virtual audio.

2.Use behavioural experiments and auditory models to validate the developed paradigms.

3.Investigate which aspects of personalisation are important for the perception of immersive spatial audio.

In addition to the standard requirements for Imperial College (which you can find at the link below), essential requirements for this post are good programming skills (Python and/or Matlab) and good experience of using statistical methods (descriptive and inferential, ML is a plus), as well as an understanding of the basic principles of acoustics and digital signal processing. Desirable requirements are experience in immersive audio and spatial acoustics, experience in neuroscience and/or psychoacoustics, and more advanced programming skills (e.g. Unity, C++, etc.)

If you are interested please click on "find out more" and apply. When you submit your application, please cite this project title in the 'how you are planning to fund your PhD' section.

Please submit your application BEFORE the 8th of January 2024.

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