A new University College London (UCL) research project underway at Here East in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park finds Professor Jian Kang heading a group of seven researchers in a study of soundscapes under an ERC Advanced Grant. Specifically, the team is looking to better understand, measure, and ultimately control soundscapes. To facilitate its explorations, the team worked with HHB Communications on a studio that could be used to accurately reproduce and study the recordings the research team has captured.

‘Working with educational institutions is always an exciting challenge for our team’, comments Scrub CTO John Johnson on behalf of HHB. ‘The parameters for rooms intended for research tend to be different from that of music or postproduction studios. Ensuring the room meets the needs of the research team is paramount to the entire HHB team.’

Under environment and building acoustics expert, Kang, the team are conducting research around soundscapes, defined in this research as requiring human perception, creating a need to study and understand how a human perceives, and is impacted by, the surrounding sonic environment. The UCL team has spent the past year gathering recordings from around the world and in different environments. To best study these recordings as soundscapes, the team needed a studio that would be able to precisely recreate the recorded environment. To do this an immersive listening room was built and equipped. Now finished, the room is equipped with 12 Genelec 8331 SAM three-way coaxial monitors set up on trusses, allowing them to be moved around as the research requires.

The room is also Dante capable, with a DAD AX32 router helping to simplify the reproduction of spatially accurate sonic environments, regardless of reproduction format. While the room was designed for the soundscape research team, this unique and flexible set up can be used for a wide variety of other applications, from sound design to music or postproduction.

‘The team at HHB worked with UCL to recommend a studio solution to meet the lab’s academic needs then monitored the delivery and installation process,’ Kang says. ‘Now the listening lab at Here East is available for the team to conduct research as well as offer students the ability to work with immersive audio.’