[AUDITORY] SONICOM project - Research Fellow and PhD posts

Apologies for cross-posting.

The SONICOM (www.sonicom.eu) project has now started! Here follows a brief summary:

Immersive audio is our everyday experience of being able to hear and interact with sounds around us. Simulating spatially located sounds in virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) must be done in a unique way for each individual. This has been the object of extensive research in the past years; nevertheless, several major challenges are still to be tackled in this area, which require an improved understanding and modelling of the human spatial hearing mechanisms. Furthermore, the impact of immersive audio beyond perceptual metrics such as presence and localisation is still an unexplored area of research, specifically when related with social interaction within virtual environments, entering the behavioural and cognitive realms.
SONICOM will put together some of the most important research centres across Europe to tackle these research challenges using a multidisciplinary approach. Research will involve a mixture of digital signal processing and artificial intelligence, together with psychology and perceptual modelling, exploring new forms, levels and dimensions of interaction within auditory-based immersive environments. Furthermore, in order to reinforce the idea of reproducible research and promoting future development and innovation in the area of auditory-based social interaction, the SONICOM Ecosystem will be created and shared with the wider community, which will include auditory data closely linked with model implementations and immersive audio rendering components.

The consortium is coordinated by the Audio Experience Design team at Imperial College London, and composed by 7 academic institutions and 3 SMEs from 6 different EU countries - here is a list of the various PIs and their institutions:

Lorenzo Picinali, Michele Geronazzo and Dan Goodman (Imperial College London)
Brian FG Katz (Sorbonne University)
Piotr Majdak (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Federico Avanzini (University of Milan)
Areti Andreopoulou (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Arcadio Reyes-Lecuona (University of Malaga)
Alessandro Vinciarelli and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow)
Yuli Levtov (Reactify, UK)
Andrea Rusconi (USound, Austria)
Hugo Furtado (Dreamwaves, Austria)

More information about the project can be found in the temporary website (www.sonicom.eu) and on the Imperial College website (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/214234/personalised-immersive-audio-will-help-virtual/).

At Imperial College London we are already hiring a PhD student (https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CDX328/phd-studentship-sonicom) and a Research Fellow (https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CEC272/research-fellow-in-immersive-audio).

Please see the updated list of posts in the SONICOM website - https://www.sonicom.eu/recruitment/positions-available).

Finally, as already communicated in the past weeks, SONICOM is organising a special session titled "Personalisation of Binaural Audio in Virtual and Augmented Reality” as part of the I3DA (Immersive and 3D Audio) conference, to be held in Bologna, Italy, on the 8-10th of September 2021 (https://www.i3da.eu/call-for-papers/).

Feel free to get in touch in case you are interested about the project and/or the posts.

Best

Lorenzo

The SONICOM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no.101017743.