Dr Josh Reiss

Queen Mary University of London

Josh Reiss investigates transformative technologies focused around audio production and sound design. He has published more than 200 scientific papers (including over 50 in premier journals and 5 best paper awards), and co-authored two books. His research has been featured in dozens of original articles and interviews on TV, radio and in the press. He is a Fellow and former Governor of the Audio Engineering Society. He co-founded the highly successful spin-out company, LandR, and recently formed a second start-up, FXive. He maintains a popular blog, YouTube channel and twitter feed for scientific education and dissemination of research activities.

Prof. Reiss has a strong interest in games research, especially procedural audio content generation.

Procedural content generation supports creation of rich and varied games, maps, levels, characters and narrative elements. But sound design has not kept pace with such innovation. Often the visual aspects of every object in the scene may be procedurally rendered, yet sound designers still rely on huge libraries of pre-recorded samples. This approach is inflexible, limited and uncreative.

An alternative is procedural audio, where sounds are created in real-time using software algorithms. But many procedural audio techniques are low quality, computational, or tailored only to a narrow class of sounds. Machine learning from the sample libraries, to select, optimise and improve the procedural models, could be the key to transforming the industry and creating procedural auditory worlds.

He welcomes the opportunity to supervise students interested in this or related topics.

Research themes:

• Procedural Content Generation

• Game Audio and Music

• Game AI

• Game Design

• Computational Creativity

• Player Experience