Program Overview

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Since the

Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR)

was created in 1998, it has become known internationally as a leading centre for research in psychoacoustic engineering, with world-class facilities and significant funding from research councils and industry.

Our single over-arching goal is simply this: to make sound better. We’re interested in human perceptions of audio quality, particularly of high-fidelity music signals. Our work combines elements of acoustics, digital signal processing, psychoacoustics (theoretical and experimental), psychology, sound synthesis, software engineering, statistical analysis and user-interface design, with an understanding of the aesthetics of sound and music. Our research aims to provide tools to assist in any area where assessment of the quality of audio as perceived by human listeners is desirable but, for one reason or another, potentially problematic; and to provide complementary tools to allow appropriate adjustment where the assessed quality is not as it should be. More generally, we aim to engineer perceptually-motivated signal analysis, processing and control systems.