Many studies of commercial music recording focus on pop, jazz, rock and classical music. However, in the twentieth-century, musical theatre Original Cast Recordings (OCRs) spent more weeks atop the US Billboard chart than The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Monkees and The Rolling Stones combined (Maslon 2018). Despite this success, they remain peripheral in the literature. This new network seeks to address the oversight. Connecting diverse expertise from scholars in musical theatre studies, sound studies, popular culture and fan studies, with museum archivists, musical theatre creatives, recording industry personnel and special interest groups such as private collectors and other stakeholders, the project will explore the sonic heritage of OCRs and what they reveal about changes in popular culture, locating material holdings for further study and use in curatorial practice, and considering the future of the OCR album. This project is urgent. The rise of online streaming has led to press pieces lamenting the 'death' of long-form listening and 'the album' as an artefact (Ingham 2018, Rolling Stone magazine). Global physical album sales more than halved between 1999 and 2009, while old recorded material is fragile and digital sound files are vulnerable to corruption, causing concern for their survival (Roy 2016). Before such changes in listening and consumption are absolute, we must consider the cultural impact of OCRs and approaches to preserving past, present and future work. Network activities will first examine OCRs as 'material' artefacts within a history of recorded media and its technologies. It will map public and private holdings, exploring ways to increase access to such repositories for future research and use by museum curators in exhibits concerning popular culture and sound media. Second, the network will consider 'methodologies' for the sustainability of OCRs, exploring the preservation of new musical theatre on record. Both themes will be underpinned by research in the third area: the cultural history, value and meaning of OCRs. Owing to the pandemic, economic efficiency and environmental awareness, two network meetings and a conference will be held online, while two meetings will be in person. The two in-person venues are apt for this project. First, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford specialise in media technologies and aim to expand their subject focus to include musical theatre. With no in-house sound archive, this project will materially enhance their access to recordings for use in exhibition; an outcome that constitutes a broader aim for the project. Second, Evie Greene (who sang on the first 'OCR' in 1900) was born in Portsmouth, and its University is home to the only international academic journal of musical theatre studies. Maximising reach and knowledge exchange, the network will co-host a 3-day conference with the British Musical Theatre Research Institute and invite presentations from external networks, special interest groups and other stakeholders such as postgraduate students. These will also be invited to open lectures at two network meetings, offering opportunities for public engagement, building impact and creating knowledge exchange beyond the immediate network. Three keynote lectures from international scholars will provide a series of provocations in response to the three themes. The network has representation from the UK, USA and Europe across various disciplines, reflecting the international nature of the project. Core membership includes museum curators, musical theatre creatives and industry representatives, enabling collaborative activity and potential for impact beyond the lifetime of this project. The network will produce two reports on archiving OCRs and new musical theatre recording, disseminated in online publications for the heritage sector and musical theatre creatives. It is anticipated that follow-on activities and a further bid to the AHRC will result.

The current global fashion supply chain is characterised by its lack of transparency, forced labour, poor working conditions, unequal power relationships and overproduction caused by fast fashion. Lacking ethics, the global fashion supply chain is also highly polluting. The total footprint of clothing in use in the UK, including global and territorial emissions, was 26.2 million tonnes CO2 in 2016, up from 24 million tonnes in 2012 (equivalent to over a third of household transport emissions). The Textiles Circularity Centre (TCC) proposes materials security for the UK by circularising resource flows of textiles. This will stimulate innovation and economic growth in the UK textile manufacturing, SME apparel and creative technology sectors, whilst reducing reliance on imported and environmentally and ethically impactful materials, and diversifying supply chains. The TCC will provide underpinning research understanding to enable the transition to a more circular economy that supports the brand 'designed and made in the UK'. To enact this vision, we will catalyse growth in the fashion and textiles sector by supporting the SME fashion-apparel community with innovations in materials and product manufacturing, access to circular materials through supply chain design, and consumer experiences. Central to our approach is to enable consumers to be agents of change by engaging them in new cultures of consumption. We will effect a symbiosis between novel materials manufacturing and agentive consumer experiences through a supply chain design comprised of innovative business models and digital tools. Using lab-proven biotechnology, we will transform bio-based waste-derived feedstock (post-consumer textiles, crop residues, municipal solid waste) into renewable polymers, fibres and flexible textile materials, as part of a CE transition strategy to replace imported cotton, wood pulp and synthetic polyester fibres and petrochemical finishes. We will innovate advanced manufacturing techniques that link biorefining of organic waste, 3D weaving, robotics and additive manufacturing to circular design and produce flexible continuous textiles and three-dimensional textile forms for apparel products. These techniques will enable manufacturing hubs to be located on the high street or in local communities, and will support SME apparel brands and retailers to offer on-site/on-demand manufacture of products for local customisation. These hubs would generate regional cultural and social benefits through business and related skills development. We will design a transparent supply chain for these textiles through industrial symbiosis between waste management, farming, bio-refinery, textile production, SME apparel brands, and consumer stakeholders. Apparel brands will access this supply chain through our digital 'Biomaterials Platform', through which they can access the materials and data on their provenance, properties, circularity, and life cycle extension strategies. Working with SME apparel brands, we will develop an in-store Configurator and novel affective and creative technologies to engage consumers in digitally immersive experiences and services that amplify couplings between the resource flow, human well being and satisfaction, thus creating a new culture of consumption. This dematerialisation approach will necessitate innovation in business models that add value to the apparel, in order to counter overproduction and detachment. Consumers will become key nodes in the circular value chain, enabling responsible and personalised engagement. As a human-centred design led centre, TCC is uniquely placed to generate these innovations that will catalyse significant business and skills growth in UK textile manufacturing, SME fashion-apparel, and creative technology sectors, and drastically reduce waste and carbon emissions, and environmental and ethical impacts for the textiles sector.

This project will look at making the search for compact binary coalescences more sensitive, by understanding how the existing PyCBC pipeline reacts to different sources of detector noise and researching novel solutions to overcome the noise. This will extend the search down in frequency and open up the intermediate mass black hole space, answering the question of whether black holes can have a mass in the pair instability supernova region. The other aspect of their project will focus on analysing optical images taken in response to gravitational-wave signals, and understanding the range of optical signals present for different types of gravitational-wave sources.

To develop and embed a sustainable technical capability to produce a commercial wireless sensor network location system and assess future applications where open information systems are required.