Building interdisciplinary connections through a new joint position

This September will be a start of building a new connection between disciplines as Sebastian Schlecht takes on the position as the professor of practice in Sound in Virtual Reality. The arrangement is a joint position between the School of Electrical Engineering and the School of Arts, connecting the Acoustics Lab with the Media Lab. Schlecht’s background is in mathematics and computer science, from where he’s moved into signal processing and acoustics.

“Especially with digital signals, you could think of sound as a series of numbers. Once you manage to do this, you realize you can use math too in sound processing.”

Also, a violinist, Schlecht has felt a desire to bring the technical and artistic worlds together, and acoustics and signal processing has proven to be a great way of combining these two interests.

“My vision for this position is to make a constructive process bringing both schools closer together and building bridges between the departments. I think that’s closely related to my background, having both worked as a technical scientist and also having done artistic work.”

At the moment, the specialization in Schlecht’s research lies in room acoustics. The way rooms sound and how we perceive them is also essential for creating virtual worlds, and this will be one of the present aspects among the courses taught by Schlecht starting from next year.