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Research that combines virtual reality with music history rarely reaches a national audience, but a project involving an academic from London Metropolitan University has done exactly that. Aural Histories: Coventry 1451–1642, in which Professor Christian Frost, Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, served as the team’s only architectural specialist, has been shortlisted for Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Times Higher Education (THE) Awards 2026. The nomination places the work among the most highly regarded UK research projects of the year and shows how universities are using immersive technology to answer questions that traditional methods alone cannot.
The premise of the project is straightforward but ambitious: recreate the experience of listening to historical music performances inside virtual reconstructions of buildings that no longer exist. The most notable of these is St Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, which was destroyed during the blitz of 1940. By combining architectural evidence, acoustic modelling and historically informed performance, the team allowed modern audiences to hear late-medieval and early-modern music in the very type of space for which it was originally written.
If the meeting point of technology, history and creative practice interests you, it is worth taking the time to explore the postgraduate and research degree options at London Metropolitan University. Registering your interest with a university early gives you access to open days, funding updates and direct contact with academics working on projects of this kind.
How a Virtual Reality Project Reconstructed Coventry’s Lost Musical World
Between 1451 and 1642, Coventry stood among the most important cities in England. Its civic and religious calendar was dense with music, performed in churches, guild halls and open streets for audiences that included merchants, clergy and visiting dignitaries. The Aural Histories project set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what did that music actually sound like to the people who heard it, in the buildings where they heard it?
Answering it required more than musical scholarship. The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in partnership with the University of Birmingham, Newcastle University and London Metropolitan University, drew on several bodies of evidence at once. Musicians and musicologists prepared and recorded performances using period instruments. Acousticians modelled how those sounds behaved within specific interiors. Architectural historians interpreted the surviving documentation to establish what the buildings looked like, how they were constructed and how people used them during major civic events.
Only by combining all three strands could the team produce reconstructions capable of withstanding academic scrutiny. This is what separates serious digital humanities work from simple visualisation: every modelling decision must be traceable to a document, a measurement or a defensible scholarly argument.
The Architectural Detective Work Behind the Virtual Models
Professor Frost’s role centred on establishing the architectural context of the research. He clarified Coventry’s festive history, traced the development of the urban environment across the project’s two-century span and interpreted the surviving records of the buildings used in the virtual reconstructions. In practice, that meant resolving questions such as how a demolished church was roofed, how large its interior was and where performers and audiences stood during services and celebrations.
The work illustrates a principle that students of architecture and design encounter repeatedly: buildings are historical sources in their own right. A surviving wall, a written measurement or an account of a civic procession can reveal how people gathered, what they valued and how sound moved through their spaces. Interpreting that evidence demands exactly the blend of visual, technical and documentary skills that architecture and design programmes aim to develop.
Professor Frost noted that while the research was grounded in scholarship and technical knowledge, it also raised questions about creative collaboration and the extent to which moments of the past can be reconstructed authentically. Those questions now sit at the centre of a growing field, and the project’s results are openly accessible so that others can examine, test and extend them.
Why St Michael’s Cathedral Matters to Music History
The most striking reconstruction in the project is St Michael’s Cathedral, Coventry’s medieval church that became a cathedral and was destroyed in the blitz of 1940. Its ruins still stand as a monument, but the building’s acoustic character — the reverberation, the way a choir’s sound carried through the nave — disappeared with it. Virtual reality allowed the team to restore that character digitally and then place recordings of period music inside it.
The result offers something neither a conventional studio recording nor a traditional academic paper can provide. Listeners do not simply hear the music; they hear it as it would have behaved in a specific space, shaped by stone surfaces, vaulting and volume. For music historians, this supplies evidence about tempo, voicing and instrumentation that scores alone cannot offer. For the public, it turns abstract scholarship into a direct sensory experience.
You do not need to be a specialist to hear the results. The team released the Aural Histories app, which lets anyone enter the reconstructed spaces — dressed as they would have been for historical events — and listen to the music that would have been performed there. Download the app, put on headphones and compare what you hear with a modern recording of the same repertoire; the difference you notice is the research made audible.
Open Access Publication and Public Engagement
Alongside the app, the project produced a scholarly open access publication, Echoes of Medieval Coventry, scheduled for release in the autumn. Open access was a deliberate choice rather than an afterthought. Research funded by public bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council increasingly carries the expectation that findings should be usable beyond academia, and this project treats that expectation as a design principle.
The practical effect is that a student, a local historian or a curious listener anywhere in the world can engage with the same material the research team used. That accessibility also strengthens the research itself: open publication invites scrutiny, correction and reuse, all of which improve the reliability of the reconstructions over time.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration as a Model for UK Research
One of the clearest lessons from Aural Histories is the value of genuine interdisciplinary work. The team brought together musicians, musicologists, architectural historians, acousticians and IT specialists, each contributing knowledge the others lacked. Professor Frost observed that the project was truly interdisciplinary and that he gathered much new knowledge about a period he had believed himself already familiar with — a reminder that collaboration is not simply additive but can overturn assumptions held even by specialists.
For prospective students, the implications are practical. Research careers in the UK increasingly reward people who can operate across disciplinary boundaries: an architect who understands acoustic modelling, a musicologist who can read building plans, a developer who respects scholarly sourcing. Postgraduate research degrees are one of the main routes into this kind of work, and universities with active research centres give students the best access to it.
The Times Higher Education Awards Nomination
The THE Awards are often described as the "Oscars of higher education" in the UK, and the Research Project of the Year categories recognise work demonstrating outstanding imagination, innovation and benefit to society. The 2026 ceremony takes place on 26 November in Birmingham, where the shortlisted projects across all categories will be honoured.
For London Metropolitan University, the shortlist recognition reflects the research culture within the School of Art, Architecture and Design and the university’s broader commitment to research and knowledge exchange. For applicants weighing up where to study, a shortlisting of this kind is a useful signal: it indicates that teaching staff are active researchers whose work is assessed at a national level, and that current debates in the field feed directly into the classroom.
Lessons for Prospective Students and Early-Career Researchers
Anyone considering postgraduate study in architecture, music, digital humanities or related fields can draw several concrete lessons from this project:
- Research skills transfer. The ability to interrogate sources, build an argument and test it against evidence underpins work in any discipline, including technology-driven projects.
- Technical fluency expands options. Virtual reality, acoustic modelling and app development are now standard research tools; students who gain these skills during their degrees become more competitive for funded projects.
- Public engagement counts. Funders increasingly prioritise projects whose outputs reach beyond academia, as the app and the open access publication demonstrate.
- Collaboration multiplies impact. Four institutions and at least five specialisms contributed to a single shortlisted project — a scale of partnership no individual researcher could achieve alone.
If you want to see this environment for yourself, book a place at an upcoming open day or arrange a campus tour at London Metropolitan University. Walking through the School of Art, Architecture and Design and speaking with staff about current projects gives you a far better sense of a programme than any prospectus can. Have questions about entry requirements or research supervision? Write to the admissions team and ask them directly.
Following Research at London Metropolitan University
The Aural Histories nomination is a reminder that significant research does not always look like laboratory science. Reconstructing the sound of a destroyed cathedral required architectural history, musicology, acoustics and software development in equal measure — and the result is a resource that scholars and the public can use for years to come. Projects of this type show how UK universities convert public funding into knowledge that is rigorous, collaborative and openly shared.
To follow this work and similar projects, explore the research news and publications from London Metropolitan University’s School of Art, Architecture and Design, and consider subscribing to university updates so that announcements about awards, new research and open days reach you first.
