Sony Corporation has launched the Sony Audio Institute at NYUs Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, focusing on innovation in the business and technology of music. Opening this spring, the Sony Audio Institute will serve as an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together the expertise of Sony’s professional and consumer audio businesses and their leading-edge technologies with NYU students, facilities and faculty. The institute opens with NYU Steinhardt Music Business Program Director Larry Miller at the helm. Miller will focus on the new outfit’s operations full time beginning this fall.

Acting through the company’s Personal Entertainment Business’ U.S. operations, Variety reports that Sony has donated $7.5 million to NYU to establish what will formally be known as the Sony Audio Institute for Music Business and Technology, which is initially established for a 10-year term.

Sony’s Personal Entertainment Business oversees Sony’s professional and consumer audio business and is “heavily focused on engagement and support of music and creators at all levels, including producers, engineers, songwriters, recording studios and more,” Sony explains in an announcement.

The new academic unit “will offer new opportunities and support to students in Steinhardt’s Music Business and Music Technology degree programs,” and also plans to undertake research projects as well as leveraging Sony’s relationships with New York City’s entertainment community through events and workshops.

“Students at New York University who study the music industry and do research at the frontiers of audio have a new benefactor,” writes The New York Times, explaining that the institute offers “an interdisciplinary approach to studying and researching the latest advances in consumer and pro-level audio tech — replete with Sony tools to facilitate.”

The partnership will make available to Steinhardt music technology and music business students “Sony audio technology including 360 Reality Audio and the 360 Virtual Mixing Environment — both of which will be outfitted in the newly-named Sony Audio Institute Studio at NYU’s Brooklyn campus,” Billboard reports.

NYU President Linda Mills said the initiative will create new opportunities including scholarships, internships, research fellowships “and other unrivaled experiences,” giving students “a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing industry.”