More DeStress(ed) minds on the job!

A Happy Belated New Year

The Project DeStress team have all had a lovely destressing time over the Christmas and New Year holiday break, that we are all raring to get back into our work, beginning with analysis on the fieldwork we conducted last summer and developing the visual scenarios for our simulator. We are inspired by the welcome addition to our project team of Jordan Greenhorn, who will be a Research Assistant on the project over the next few months. Jordan has been helping find attenuation values and absorption coefficients for various building materials to help with our acoustic modelling of our case study sites. You can read more about Jordan’s background on our People page.

Neil has been busy developing the visual scenarios for our simulator as well as developing a fantastic tool for choosing sound sources to create an acoustic environment that is reflective of our real world sites and our future experimental versions of those sites. Although we surveyed three sites, in three different cities, we are producing virtual models of two of the sites, as that is plenty to keep us busy with!!

As for Sarah, she has been getting stuck into the analysis collected from all the wonderful 159 participants who completed the questionnaire in our three sites last August and September. It’s really interesting reflecting back on the sounds that people heard in these spaces, how it made them feel and comparing that to the objective data that Neil collected at the same time… we are hoping to publish a paper in the very near future with some of our findings from these case study sites. So keep an eye out for that!

Lisa is getting into full swing of developing and finessing her PhD project ideas. She’s been learning about new methods and research design strategies to support her existing soundscape knowledge. It’s going to be an exciting year ahead as the PhD progresses.

Finally, if you missed our Christmas video, here it is again, a lovely (fake) snowy scene in Hove on the south coast of the UK. Not that many down south need a reminder of what snow is given the snowfall that occurred this week! This video gives a nice sneak preview of what we are currently developing, but will have many more sounds and visual features to add. Watch, and listen out to, this space!!

A DeStress Christmas Video