This theme stimulated interests which still define the work he is involved in today, whether that be through his installations, sound-walks, acousmatic compositions or the sound designs he has made for museums and galleries.
Prior was awarded a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) stipendium in 1999, funding a one-year residency at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he completed the work submitted for his PhD.
They worked together again on the Arts Council funded Good Vibrations children's education project in 1999 but it wasn't until 2003 that they formally established Liminal, a design studio with a particular interest in exploring sound and architecture.
The partnership has resulted in projects ranging from installations to sound-walks as well as commercial sound design and consultancy and a number of theoretical publications and conference papers.
Liminal was formed as a company in order to undertake Swash (2003), a large-scale, immersive sound installation for Living Coasts in Devon and in keeping with other recent work, this piece has evolved into a number of different iterations.
In 2007, Prior was commissioned by the SpACE-Net spatial audio research group in York to produce a third, improvised version of the work which has been performed a number of times subsequently.
Liminal's recent work has focussed on the creation of 'listening spaces', whether this takes the form of a site-specific sound-walk, such as Black Water Brown Water (2008) or architectural interventions such as Song Pole with poet Larry Lynch (2008), the point of departure for these pieces is to create a reflexive listening experience for the audience; focussing attention back onto the act of listening itself.
[2] Prior began working with New Zealander Dugal McKinnon in 1998 on a composed radio documentary Ways of Hearing [3] for Resonance FM as part of John Peel's Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre, London.
Meanwhile, Prior was also asked by UK songwriter John Matthias to produce two tracks on his Ninja Tune release Stories From the Water Cooler.