Other Laboratories and Centres

Facilities for Research in Audio and Acoustics
Students undertaking research degrees in acoustics or audio have access to a wide range of physical resources for field, studio and laboratory-based projects.

Some examples include the Faculty's anechoic room (a room without echoes), and the laboratory's reverberation chamber for traditional building acoustics measurements. Various techniques can be applied to creating virtual sound spaces for subjective studies, including recordings made with a dummy head (which has microphones in the two ears) and impulse responses rooms made using architectural acoustics software, such as CATT-Acoustic and Odeon.

The laboratory has recently installed an 8-channel 'ambisonic' loudspeaker system, which can be used for precise sound space simulations without headphones for room acoustics research projects ranging from small music practice rooms to concert halls, including field measurements, live performance soundfield analysis, virtual acoustics, subjective testing, and statistical modelling. The laboratory is also well equipped for field measurements of background noise, with state-of-the-art sound level meters and analysis tools.

The Faculty also has sound recording and sound production studios, Head and Torso Simulator for speech simulation, communication system testing, room acoustics measurement, psychoacoustical measurements, sound quality analysis and binaural recordings.

Digital Media Studio
Established in 1998, the digital media studio augments the Faculty's existing computing resources and provides a network of Silicon Graphics workstations which are used for 3D animation and graphics programming.

Illumination Laboratories
There are a number of lighting laboratories in the building. The photometric laboratory contains an optical bench (which also serves as a distribution photometer), an integrating sphere and numerous measuring instruments. The psychophysics laboratory has a dimmable lighting system for various experiments. A specialised teaching room is equipped with lamps, luminaires and other equipment and there is also a heliodon.

Darkrooms and Plan Printing
Darkrooms, plan printing equipment and an artiscope are available for student use.

Other Laboratories
The Faculty has well-established laboratories and items of equipment for teaching, student project work and graduate and staff research. These also include: materials laboratory, stress grading laboratory, ventilation model laboratory, small models laboratory, large models laboratory, services laboratory, heliodon, elementary and senior mechanics laboratories, anechoic room, acoustics laboratory, reverberant room, psychophysics laboratory, natural lighting laboratory, photometry laboratory, three artificial skies and a thermal environment laboratory.