The Listening Experience Database (LED) project is a collaboration between The Open University, the Royal College of Music and (in its second phase) the University of Glasgow. It was awarded a £0.75m grant over three years from 2012-15 and a further grant of £0.98m from 2016-19 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The main purpose of the project is to develop a database, freely searchable by the public, which will bring together a mass of data about people’s experiences of listening to music of all kinds, in any historical period and any culture. The project involves the general public by using crowdsourcing as one of the ways in which data is collected. The database went live for public use on the project website in December 2013.

The latest phase of the project takes a more specific historical and cultural focus: its title is ‘Listening and British cultures: listeners’ responses to music in Britain, c. 1700-2018’ (please see the Project Team page for the particular research topics). However, the database itself is still open to listening experiences from any period, culture, musical genre or country.