The project uses virtual reality to allow people to listen to historical music performances in locations which no longer exist
Date: 9 September 2026
A London Metropolitan University academic played a key role in a research project which has been nominated for a prestigious award.
It explored the changing experience of music in late-medieval and early-modern Coventry through a series of performances and recordings within Virtual Reality reconstructions of lost performing spaces – most notably St Michael’s Cathedral, which was destroyed during the blitz of 1940.
Entitled "Aural Histories: Coventry 1451–1642", it was shortlisted for Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Times Higher Education (THE) Awards 2026.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded endeavour was led by Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in partnership with the University of Birmingham, Newcastle University and London Met.
Professor Christian Frost, Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Met, was the only architectural academic on the team.
He was responsible for clarifying the architectural context of the project, including Coventry’s festive history, the development of the urban environment from 1451 to 1642, as well as interpreting the surviving documentation on the buildings used for the reconstruction of the virtual models.
Christian said: “The Aural Histories Coventry project was a fantastic creative collaboration between musicians, musicologists, architectural historians, acousticians and IT specialists.
“While the whole research was grounded in scholarship and technical knowhow, it also touched on issues of creative collaboration and to what extent we can reconstruct moments of the past authentically. The results of both these aspects of the research are openly accessible to everyone.”
The research group created an Aural Histories app alongside a scholarly open access publication entitled Echoes of Medieval Coventry which will be available in the autumn.
“It allows everyone to engage in the research by entering - virtually - places dressed as they would have been for various historical events and listen to the music that would have been sung accompanied by period instruments,” said Christian.
“It was a truly interdisciplinary research project where I gathered much new knowledge about Coventry and from all members of the team about a period I thought I was already familiar with.”
The THE Awards, dubbed the “Oscars” of higher education, will take place on 26 November in Birmingham.
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Professor Christian Frost is Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design