Dr Stuart Cunningham
Senior Lecturer
Stuart is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in User Experience (UX), and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University. He has been working in higher education for 20 years in a variety of academic, research, and leadership roles. Stuart joined the University of Chester in 2023 and prior to this held posts at Wrexham Glyndwr University and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Following completion of his BSc and MSc awards from the University of Paisley, Stuart obtained his PhD in audio data compression from the University of Wales, whilst in the initial years of his lecturing career. Since then, he has taught a variety of subjects in computer science and related creative technology domains. In addition to working with undergraduate and postgraduate students, he has been involved in the design and delivery of degree apprenticeships.
He is author of research articles, book chapters, and several music and artistic pieces, reflecting his broad range of interdisciplinary interests when it comes to research and external collaboration. Stuart is a Fellow and Chartered IT Professional of the British Computer Society (BCS) and sits on its Chester and North Wales Branch Committee.
Stuart’s teaching focus is primarily on topics relating to user experience, interface design and web systems across undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of Chester. In addition, he supervises final year and dissertation project students in these areas.
Stuart’s research interests cover a range of computing and creative hybrids, including audio compression, affective technologies, sonic interaction, sound design, and immersion. He is Chair of the Audio Mostly steering committee and is a regular review for many international journals, such as IEEE Access, Multimedia Tools and Applications, and Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. He has been a Guest Editor for the Journal of Healthcare Engineering and Journal of the Audio Engineering Society.
Stuart has supervised multiple PhD students to successful completion and has examined doctoral candidates at universities in the UK and overseas. He is currently supervising PhD candidates in the areas of audio emotion recognition, collaborative AI for music production, and affective gaming.
McIntosh, T. H., Weinel, J., & Cunningham, S. (2022). Lundheim: exploring affective audio techniques in an action-adventure video game. In Proceedings of the 17th International Audio Mostly Conference (pp. 155-158).
Pike, J., Picking, R., Cunningham, S. (2021). “Robot companion cats for people at home with dementia: a qualitative case study on companotics”, Dementia, 20(4) pp. 1300-1318.
Cunningham, S., McGregor, I. (2021). “Evaluating use of the Doppler Effect to Enhance Auditory Alerts”, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 37(11) pp. 1074-1087.
Griffiths, D., Cunningham, S., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2021). “A multi-genre model for music emotion recognition using linear regressors”, Journal of New Music Research, 50(4) pp. 355-372.
Cunningham, S., Ridley, H., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2021). “Supervised machine learning for audio emotion recognition”, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 25(4) pp. 637-650.
Cunningham, S., Brill, M., Whalley, J.H., Read, R., Anderson, G., Edwards, S., Picking, R. (2019). “Assessing Wellbeing in People Living with Dementia Using Reminiscence Music with a Mobile App (Memory Tracks): A Mixed Methods Cohort Study”, Journal of Healthcare Engineering, pp. 1-10.
Cunningham, S., McGregor, I. (2019). “Subjective Evaluation of Music Compressed with the ACER Codec Compared to AAC, MP3, and Uncompressed PCM”, International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, pp. 1-16.
- BSc Computer Networks (University of Paisley, UK)
- MSc Multimedia Communications (University of Paisley, UK)
- PhD Exploiting Musical Repetition for Data-Reduced Audio Coding (University of Wales, UK)