Under the Audio Research Partnership, experts from both organisations will develop new skills and share research findings with industry to enable new products such as HD audio.

Professor Adrian Hilton, head of Surrey’s Visual Media Research Group, said: “We hope that our collaboration will continue to flourish and provide significant benefits to those who use, watch and listen to broadcasts across a wide spectrum of programmes.”

BBC Research and Development is using the initiative to work more closely with the Higher Education sector in the field of audio-visual research and innovation.

Technical areas of focus include audio semantics, 3D audio-visual production and room acoustics, with research planned into areas such as speech recognition and audio coding.