Funding Announcement
Sonic Intangibles is one of two projects led by Northumbria to be selected for funding in the neww UKRI cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme designed to stimulate exciting new interdisciplinary research across nine different research councils.
Paul Vickers, Professor of Sonification in Computer and Information Sciences, will lead a study with researchers from Northumbria and Newcastle universities which will create a new hub for sonification innovation.
Sonification is a way of communicating information through sound. While human vision can only focus on one thing at a time, we can track multiple sound sources at once, from any direction, and we can understand and feel different things through sound.
After using sonification to transform computer network traffic into nature sounds, Professor Vickers was recently able to discover a new method of cyber-attack. He generated a soundscape that represented the network’s real-time environment and listening to it led to the discovery of a new cyber-attack that had penetrated network defences.
His study will bring together experts in areas such as spatial audio, music, astronomy, culture, materials science and mathematics to explore intangible phenomena through sound. Its aim is to break down interdisciplinary barriers and open new ways of understanding through sound, making the North East a world-leading hub in sonification research.
Professor Vickers explained: “Listening is not limited to the ear – it is inter-sensory and transmodal. We can perceive non-sonic attributes, feel noise in our bodies and we can infer information about intangible things we cannot see by the noises they make, for example, unusual sounds made by a car’s brakes tell us a mechanic is needed.
“Sonification lets us select data that we wish to explore or monitor and attach sounds to it, thus bringing the intangible such as distant galaxies, computer network traffic or the earth’s magnetosphere into our audible experience.”
— Northumbria University Press Release