Research centres
Sound Practice and Research at City St George's
  1. Our research
  2. Our impact
  3. People
  4. Media
  5. Events
  6. SPARC Lab
Sound Practice and Research at City St George's

Our research

SPARC’s research agenda is addressed to transforming practice and to making positive changes in the world. The activities of the Centre fall into two research clusters: Communities, Health and Well-being, & Innovative Sound Practices.

Cluster 1: Communities, Health and Well-being

We explore ways in which arts-based initiatives in health and community settings can improve people’s wellbeing by reshaping their connection to social and environmental contexts and enhancing their everyday experience. Multisensory participatory research, inclusive of music and sound, is core to a key focus on creative health.  Our research is interdisciplinary, addressing a wide variety of contexts and needs. These range from uses of creative and participatory arts to support mental wellbeing and neurodivergent experience, to the design of multisensory environments to support health. Featured projects:

Sonic Teheran ran from 2021-2023. The project was an interdisciplinary  exploration of Tehran as a sounded space and was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

CREATE Arts-based mental health research, using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing, poetry is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot.

Cluster 2: Innovative Sound Practices

We use cutting-edge and experimental methods for shaping sound and exploring what sound can do in the world. These range from investigating the embodied practices of musicians to studying the potential of AI, spatial audio and other technologies and approaches in music composition. We use these innovative sound practices to push the aesthetic and ethical boundaries of music-making and to develop new artistic responses to social, political and environmental issues. Featured projects:

Listen To My World was born out of an interest in listening to stories less often told, and the belief that these stories matter. But what is more, that they may show us different ways of thinking about ourselves and the world, and how we might change the structures that permeate society and privilege only the very few.

Prestidigitation is a work for percussion and three-dimensional electronics. AI is the magic of the present. In our daily rituals we ask the computer our deepest questions and respond to its commands.