I am Associate Professor at Sorbonne University and a senior research scientist s in the Sound Analysis and Synthesis team at the Sound and Music Sciences and Technologies laboratory (Ircam, CNRS, Sorbonne University). My background is primarily in mathematics, computer science, and physics, including a Master internship at the CMNAT, University of Berkeley, Califronia under the supervision of Adrian Freed and David Wessel and graduate of the 2005-2006 Master 2 ATIAM (Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science Applied to Music) at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie; secondarily in musicology, with a Master 2 in Arts, Philosophy and Aesthetics from the Université Vincennes Saint-Denis in 2006 under the supervision of Ivanka Stoïanova. I have a doctoral thesis in computer science and telecommunications entitled: ‘MeLos:analysisandmodellingofspeechprosodyandspeakingstyle’ (2011) under the supervision of Xavier Rodet, for which I was awarded the prize for the best doctoral thesis by the Fondation Des Treilles in 2011. In 2023, I defended my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) entitled: ‘From signal modelling to representation learning: structured modelling of speech signals’. At the interface of the bio-sensible world and formal theories of information, communication, and cognition, I have developed through time a keen interest in modelling behaviour and interactions between humans, animals and robots. My research activities focus mainly on generative modelling of complex human productions such as speech, singing and music with various applications in sound and multimodal generation, cyber-physical human and musical systems, and augmented creation. I am a researcher committed to the technological, creative and ethical implications of my research, particularly the impact of artificial intelligence on artistic creation, the creative professions and the creative and cultural industries. I am also involved in the issues of inclusion and digital sovereignty in order to promote the presence and diversity of dialects, languages and cultures in the digital world. I am responsible for the Master's degree in Intelligent Systems (SI), in which I teach digital audio signal processing, machine learning and deep neural networks, and I am also responsible for the Hands-on AI: Deep Learning by Practice professional training course offered at Sorbonne University. I am the founder of DeepVoice, Paris (since 2020), the Paris event on speech technologies and artificial intelligence, SophIA (2021): Sorbonne University's student association for Artificial Intelligence in collaboration with the Sorbonne Centre for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), and Fast-Forward (2022) the informal and experimental meetings of science and technology and sound design in cinema and the moving image. I am currently a board member and secretary of the French Association on Speech Communication (AFCP) and chair of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech Synthesis (SynSIG).

As part of my artistic commitment at Ircam, I am very involved in promoting digital science and technology for the arts, culture and heritage with numerous collaborations with renowned artists such as Eric Rohmer, Philippe Parreno, Roman Polansky, Leos Carax, George Aperghis and Alexander Schubert.

Email : Nicolas.Obin (at) ircam.fr
Team : Analyse et synthèse des sons (Sorbonne Université)