Mental health issues and stress is rising, with a substantial economic cost on society; in 2011, the UK Department of Health reported mental health costs of £105billion. People need time and restorative environments to help them recover from stressors and deter mental health problems. However, as reported by the World Health Organisation, increased environmental noise exposure in urban environments is having a detrimental impact on people's mental health and wellbeing. Urban sounds can at times be positively evaluated and support restoration, but little is known on how to design environments to create these positive 'soundscapes'. Although research into soundscapes and cognitive restoration is growing, there are still disconnects with applied built environment design. This project innovatively integrates these different disciplinary areas of research. It draws on the disparate existing information to create a tool to advance knowledge on the relationships between these areas, thereby providing a means to inform evidence-based designs. The aim of the project is to develop a visual soundscape simulator of urban quiet and calm areas to assist in Designing and Engineering Soundscapes To enable Restorative Environments for Sustainable Societies (DeStress). The visual soundscape simulator (VSS) will be both informative and a methodological research instrument. Novel features of the VSS include the presentation of audio and visual stimuli, the inclusion of positive and negative sounds, the ability to adapt the scene and sound sources to represent multiple virtual built environment sites, and the mapping of soundscape health outcomes. It will provide the opportunity to determine the objective (independently measured) and subjective (self-report) health outcomes of exposure to different built environment infrastructure and their resultant soundscapes. Project DeStress will be structured by four Work Packages (WP) to meet the aim, each producing research outcomes with long term public and social, industrial, economic, policy, and academic impact. WP1 will establish any disconnects between council and public identified quiet and calm urban areas. This will aid policy guidance for identification methods of quiet and calm areas, which currently only include sound levels and physical size. WP2 creates pre-rendered audio-visual virtual simulations of real and engineered quiet and calm urban areas, and then provides a soundscape map including typical health outcomes from those who experience such a place. This provides acoustic consultants, contractors, planners, and environmental health officers with evidence-informed design outcomes to assist with their planning decisions. Usability testing in WP3 will ensure the VSS is user-friendly with appropriate soundscape map visualisations and clear graphical interfaces to engage the public and practitioner end-users. Public accessibility of the online tool helps inform the public about the impact of urban soundscapes on their health and wellbeing. This empowers them with knowledge for campaigning for appropriate preservation of restorative soundscapes through contributing to Local Community Planning Partnerships. Finally, validation tests in WP4 of the accessible online VSS will determine the accuracy of the tool and will enable experimental research into increased understanding of the relationship between soundscapes, restoration, and the design of built environments. This will assist the development of sustainable urban healthy societies.

What do warnings for climate change, the pandemic, rising fascism sound like? Does an alarm have to be alarming? How can we address alarm fatigue, both as lived reality and as a metaphor for our current state? 'Preemptive Listening' is a practice-based research project which re-imagines sirens and emergency signals, resulting in a documentary film/exhibition, an audio archive, a symposium, a related issue of the journal Disclaimer, and a co-authored journal article. The project is both a diagnosis of shifts in emergency signal communication and a series of propositions, speculating new siren sounds. Nested within the crisis of our attention economy, the siren is undergoing a profound transformation, prompted by our ongoing alarm fatigue and noise pollution, as well as the near-obsolescence and inefficiency of public soundsystem broadcasts. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the cold war, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness. The siren serves as a worldwide cipher of potential trauma, an emblem of climate catastrophe, a mouthpiece for sonic governance. We are transitioning from loud alarms heard collectively in the public sphere, to vibratory alerts received individually on personal mobile devices. The project is informed by an auraldiverse approach, expanding our understanding of who listens and how. It questions the efficiency of our inherited sirens, and the capaciousness of our conceptual frameworks of emergency - primarily used to signal a singular incident (fire) and an immediate responsive course of action. It will attempt to rewire our listening from the inherited soundscapes associated with the siren, questioning whether our crisis management signalling systems are perhaps part of the crisis. In an age of intersecting political, manmade and ecological disasters - can we envision sounds not only scored to immediacy, but signals set to a longer temporal frame, sounding the alarm for the unimaginable distant future, the thresholds of extinction? A soundtrack of new siren sounds composed by an array of acclaimed experimental musicians will map a speculative future for emergency signals. This will be supplemented by neuroscientific perspectives and insights from activists and cultural historians to open up what we understand as emergencies and how they are communicated, extending physically beyond ear-centred listening and conceptually beyond immediate timeframes. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of people, the research project aims to unpack the critical potential of reimagining sirens, and the interview archive will feed into the documentary film, inform the symposium held at the RCA, public events at Kunsternes Hus (Oslo) and the related journal article. These main outcomes will provide a valuable format for increased awareness and better understanding of the changing methods of emergency signal communication, which can feed into enhanced quality of life, and impact public services and policy. The film will extend this urgent discussion by amplifying it beyond the immediate academic and artistic network, further developing links across academia, industry and non-academic audiences. Drawing on the PIs extensive cross-disciplinary practice as an internationally recognised artist working with film and sound, a major goal of this research project is to engage with the enactive power of artistic practice at the intersection of the fields of film, music, sound art, sociology, media studies, and deaf studies, generating an artistic output that is in itself an experiment in listening. This timely project continuously accrues depth and nuance as our concepts of emergency and crisis management strategies keep shifting, inflected by the asymptomatic, the imperceptible potential disaster that has no warning signs, and does not easily reveal itself as actionable. Emergency signal recalibration is urgent.

There is currently a risk that drones are taking to the air without sufficient consideration of their noise impact on public health and wellbeing. Government and industry agree that drone technologies will lead to a significant business opportunity. Drones are expected to support an efficient provision of public services, and therefore deliver substantial societal benefits. But there is a very real barrier to making this a reality - none of this can happen if noise issues are not taken care of at design, operation and policy levels. The pandemic crisis has served to propel the use of drones to deliver food and medicines. It is now more certain that drone technologies will be widely adopted in the short future for a range of applications from parcel delivery to transport of people. These applications are set to grow thanks to the EC U-space and UK Future Flight initiatives, which are creating a clear framework to allow the creating of a market for drone services. However, the noise of hundreds of drones flying around will certainly lead to conflicts with communities. To date, there is not a comprehensive understanding on how drone noise is perceived and what can be done to operate drones without affecting public health and wellbeing. Noise is already a serious issue. As reported by the European Environment Agency, environmental noise already causes approximately 16,600 cases of premature death in Europe each year, with almost 32 million adults suffering annoyance and over 13 million adults suffering sleep disturbance. Assessing noise perception of drones and developing actions to mitigate their impact on communities is challenging, due to their unconventional sound signatures and operating procedures. Standard measures of sound power (proposed in EU Regulation 2019/945) are inadequate to characterise this. But it's also an opportunity to innovate in the way transportation noise issues are dealt with. In this project, I will develop models to predict human response to drone noise. Integrated into the design cycle, these perception noise models will allow to noise issues to be anticipated early in the design process. This approach will avoid costly and inefficient ad hoc corrections at later stages, and therefore, will go beyond the traditional approach on aircraft noise assessment. I will investigate how context influences drone noise perception. People won't perceive a drone delivering a parcel to their neighbours equally to a drone providing medical supplies. Furthermore, I will investigate noise annoyance and audibility for a comprehensive set of drone operating conditions, to define acceptable noise characteristics for drone operations. The outcomes of my project will inform how and where to fly drones to minimise impact on existing soundscapes. The work in my project will be connected to industry design, policy making and organisations lobbing for noise abatement, through a steering group with the main drone stakeholders. I will develop a toolkit to aid manufacturers to reduce the noise impact of their vehicles. Developing quiet technologies will give the UK drone industry, which has over 700 entities, an edge in a highly competitive market both domestic & overseas. I will also write a policy brief to inform regulations for operating drones with less impact on people's health and wellbeing. Regulations for quiet drone operations would allow greater usage for the benefit of the people in the UK. The outcomes of my project are planned to have direct impact in the small-to-medium size drone market, and set the foundations for potential future impact in drones for transport of people. In summary, my work will address the noise issues related to the design and operation of drones, to aid drone stakeholders to ensure community acceptance, and contribute to the sustainable expansion of the sector. This will contribute to maintain the UK world-leading position on drone research and development.

The acoustics industry contributes £4.6 billion to the UK's economy annually, employing more than 16,000 people, each generating over £65,000 in gross value added across over 750 companies nationwide. The productivity of acoustics industry is similar to that of other enabling technologies, for example the UK photonics industry (£62k per employee in 2014). Innovation through research in acoustics is a key to its industry success. The UK's acoustics industry and research feeds into many major global markets, including the $10 billion market for sound insulation materials in construction, $7.6 billion ultrasound equipment market and $31 billion market for voice recognition. This is before the vital role of acoustics in automotive, aerospace, marine and defence is taken into consideration, or that of the major UK industries that leverage acoustics expertise, or the indirect environmental and societal value of acoustics is considered. All the four Grand Challenges identified in the 2017 UK Industrial Strategy require acoustics innovation. The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF, https://www.ukri.org/innovation/industrial-strategychallenge-fund/) focuses on areas all of which need support from acoustics as an enabling technology. The future of acoustics research in the UK depends on its ability to contribute to the Four Grand Challenges. Numerous examples are emerging to demonstrate the central role of acoustics in addressing the four Grand Challenges and particularly through more focused research. The acoustics-related research base in the UK is internationally competitive, but it is important to continue to link this research directly to the four Grand Challenges. In this process, the role of UK Acoustics Network (UKAN) is very important. The Network unites over 870 members organised in 15 Special Interest Groups (www.acoustics.ac.uk) who represent industry, academia and various non-academic organisations which success relies on the quality of acoustics related research in the UK. UKAN was funded by the EPSRC as a standard Network grant with the explicit aim of pulling together the formerly disparate and disjoint acoustics community in the UK, across both industry and academia. UKAN has been remarkably successful. Its success is manifested in the large number of its members, numerous network events it has run since its inception in November 2017 and contribution it has made to the acoustics research community. Unfortunately, UKAN has not been in the position to fund new, pilot adventurous or translational projects nor has it any funding support for on-going research or knowledge transfer (KT) activities. The purpose of UKAN+ is to move beyond UKAN, create strategic connections between acoustics challenges and the Grand Challenges and to tackle these challenges through pilot studies leading in turn to full-scale grant proposals and systematic research and KT projects involving a wider acoustics community. There is a great opportunity for the future of the UK's acoustics related research to move on beyond this point, build upon the assembled critical mass and explore the trans-disciplinary work initiated by UKAN. Therefore, this proposal is for UKAN+ to take this community to the next stage, connect this Network more widely in the UK and internationally to contribute through coordinated research to the solution of Grand Challenges set by the government. UKAN+ will develop a new roadmap for acoustics research in the UK related to Grand Challenges, award exploratory (pilot) cross-disciplinary research projects to the wider community to support adventure research and knowledge transfer activities agreed in the roadmap and support the development of develop full-scale bids to the government research funding bodies which are aligned with the Grand Challenges. UKAN+ will also set up a National Centre or Coordination of Acoustics Research, achieve full sustainability and support best Equality, Diversity and Inclusion practices.