Trevor Cox

CHQ&A

Our guest this episode is Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford. Professor Cox’s research and teaching focuses on architectural acoustics, signal processing and audio perception. He has written several books for academics and the general public, most recently The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World and Now You’re Talking: Human Conversation from the Neanderthals to Artificial Intelligence.

A former senior media fellow at the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Professor Cox has presented 25 documentaries for BBC radio and has been featured on BBC1, Teachers TV, Discovery and National Geographic channels; one of his most popular interviews concerned the debunking of the myth that “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” He has also written for New Scientist and The Guardian, and runs a website that hosts experiments to test people’s responses to sound: sound101.org, which hosted the popular experiment on the “Worst Sound in the World.”

Professor Cox joined our Christopher Dahlie (who during the day serves as head of audio at the Chautauqua Amphitheater) for an in-studio conversation on July 23, shortly after Cox delivered a lecture in the Amphitheater as part of a week themed “The Life of the Spoken Word.”