• Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Manchester Metropolitan University
• PhD, University of Manchester
• MSc Audiology, University of Manchester
• HND Music Production, Redtape Studios
• BSc Psychology, Sheffield Hallam University

• Kroos, C., Bones, O., Cao, Y., Harris, L., Jackson, P.J., Davies, W.J., Wang, W., Cox, T.J. & Plumbley, M.D., 2019. “Generalisation in environmental sound classification: the ‘making sense of sounds’ data set and challenge”. In ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 8082-8086). IEEE.
• Bones, O., Cox, T. J., & Davies, W. J., 2018. “Sound categories: category formation and evidence-based taxonomies”. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1277.
• Maggu, A. R., Wong, P. C. M., Antoniou, M., Bones, O., Liu, H., & Wong, F. C. K., 2018. “Effects of combination of linguistic and musical pitch experience on subcortical pitch encoding.” Journal of Neurolinguistics. 47, 145-155
• Bones, O, Cox, T. J., & Davies, W. J., 2018. “Distinct categorization strategies for different types of environmental sounds.” Paper presented at Euronoise 2018, Crete
• Bones, O. & Wong, P. C. M., 2017. “Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones.” Neuropsychologia. 104, 48-53

Olly’s research interests concern cognitive load, working memory, and human interaction with assistive AI. He is also leading a project investigating the application of the principles of psychological flexibility in educational spaces, and co-investigator on the ‘Healthy Minds Study’ (UOW Ethics# 2025/034) in collaboration with American University of Sharjah, and ‘Clinician perspectives on AD/HD assessment in the United Arab Emirates’ (UOW Ethics# 2025/152) in collaboration with colleagues at University of Wollongong.

Olly's PhD research investigated the neurological basis for the perception of musical consonance, and many of his recent supervised student projects have concerned music: exploring the role of personality factors in the perception of musical consonance; the role of music in identity formation in the Arab diaspora; and parasocial relationship formation with music artists.

Whilst at Manchester Metropolitan University he was awarded a grant to establish a psychoacoustics laboratory and to investigate the relative contributions of cognitive decline and peripheral neural coding deficits to age-related impairment to speech perception.

Whilst at the University of Salford Olly worked with machine learning and data science researchers on an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council-funded project called ‘Making Sense of Sounds’, a project that involved understanding how humans categorise everyday sounds and creating a curated data set that was made available to the machine learning research community as a classification challenge, whereby researchers attempted to produce models that could categorise sounds in the same way that humans do (see Bones, Cox, & Davies, 2018, and Kroos et al., 2019).

• AED 400,000 Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority grant, investigating factors related to childhood obesity (Co-I)
• Pump-priming award from Alzheimer’s Research UK Network Centre, investigating mild-cognitive impairment (Co-I)
• £20,000 medical research grant from the Dowager Countess Eleanor Peel Trust, investigating age-related deficits in speech perception (PI)
• £43,020 ESRC Doctoral Training College studentship, ranked third in Psychology across institutions in the Northwest of England.

• Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) at British Psychological Society

• Psychological Sciences