The SOUNDS team is an amalgamation of the early stage researchers (ESRs), academic and industrial research scientists, technological advisors, and project coordinators. Several complementary research institutions make up the SOUNDS consortium, each from different sectors with expertise in diverse disciplines and applications.

The four academic participants, KU Leuven, Aalborg University (AAU), Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine (IMPERIAL), and Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (UOL) a common scientific ground in the signal processing research community. However, each of the four involved research groups has a different and clearly identifiable research profile with crucial expertise for the SOUNDS ETN: distributed signal processing and optimization (KU LEUVEN), network-driven signal processing and coding (AAU), medical acoustics and hearing research (UOL), and machine learning and acoustic inference (IMPERIAL).

The non-academic participants consists of the commercial enterprises: Bang and Olufsen (BEO), Nuance Communications Inc. (NSV), Oticon A/S (OTICON), Cerence GmbH (CERENCE), Televic Conference NV (TELEVIC), one small and medium-sized enterprise, CEDAR Audio Ltd. (CEDAR), and one research organization, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (FHG). Their diversity and complementarity is illustrated by observing that these participants cover as many speech, audio, and IoT technology areas: hearing care solutions (OTICON), high-end domestic audio/video (BEO), voice-to-text conversion (NSV), audio-based assistive systems (FHG), speech technology (CERENCE), conference systems (TELEVIC), and audio restoration (CEDAR).

From these research institutions, nine are beneficiaries, who serve as host institutions for the ESRs and are fully committed to the execution of the SOUNDS research and training programme, and two are partner organizations, who will provide supervision and research facilities to the ESRs seconded to their institutions, will be involved in organizing network-wide training events, and will actively participate in the Research Training Workshops.

The overall strategy and implementation of the SOUNDS project will also be guided and adapted according to the feedback and advice from an advisory board of experts from external industry, academia, ethics and privacy, as well as societal stakeholders (e.g. target user group representatives).