Research Structure

Since its founding in 1977, IRCAM has had a fundamental mission: to foster productive interactions among scientific research, technological development, and contemporary musical creation. This interplay forms the main structuring axis of all its activities. One major goal is to contribute, through advances in science and technology, to the renewal of musical expression. Conversely, the specific challenges posed by contemporary creation often lead to original scientific breakthroughs—whether theoretical, methodological, or applied—whose impact extends far beyond the musical domain alone.

This original research dynamic, oriented toward artistic creation with all the rigor and sensitivity it entails in the elaboration and manipulation of sound and music, generates scientific and technological innovations whose applications are increasingly widespread: for music and sound professionals, industry, education, and the general public. This mediation between musical research and creation particularly includes the development of software and technological tools for musicians—composers, performers, and musicologists—based on models and prototypes developed by research teams working across the various domains related to music: computer science (languages, human–computer interfaces, real-time systems, databases), signal processing and automation, acoustics, auditory perception and cognitive psychology, and musicology.

At IRCAM, research and development are organized as two complementary activities. They are carried out within the joint research unit Sciences and Technologies of Music and Sound (UMR 9912 – STMS), supported by the CNRS, Sorbonne University, and the French Ministry of Culture.

The joint research lab is organized into seven teams, each defined by its theoretical grounding and research focus, covering the full spectrum of music and sound sciences and technologies. A transversal working group addresses issues at the interface of Sound–Music–Health. Finally, the laboratory includes a dedicated axis for musical research, which encompasses direct collaborations between scientists and musicians.

The STMS Lab

Director: Charlotte Truchet
Deputy Director: Markus Noisternig

The UMR9912 STMS Research Lab, founded in 1995 and hosted by IRCAM, brings together the CNRS, Sorbonne University, the French Ministry of Culture, and IRCAM around the theme of multidisciplinary research on science and technology for music and sound. The lab is connected with the CNRS INS2I (main), and INSHS as well as the Sorbonne University engineering school.

The laboratory is made up of the following research teams:

Sound Systems and Signals: Audio/Acoustics, InstruMents
Acoustic and Cognitive Spaces
Sound Perception and Design
Sound Analysis & Synthesis
Sound Music Movement Interaction
Musical Representations
Analysis of Musical Practices

With over a hundred collaborators—researchers, engineers, technicians, and doctoral students—half of which are from IRCAM and the others from the university and the EPST, the STMS is the largest laboratory in the world devoted to research on sciences for music and sound.

The multidisciplinary research carried out in STMS offers a variety of viewpoints on the complexity of the audio-musical project with comprehensive approaches to modeling, simulation, formal representations and computer languages, human-machine interaction, perception and cognition, an musicology.

These themes are divided among the lab’s teams in order to address the physical aspects of sound production and propagation more specifically (instrumental acoustics and physical models), the analysis and synthesis of sound via signal methods, spatial analysis and synthesis of acoustic fields, composition, improvisation and computer-assisted performance, the analysis of creative processes, the neurocognition of emotion or sound design, and, more generally, the question of natural and artificial creativity and its relationships with the body, space, mind, and information.

Research Structure

The STMS Lab

Organizational Chart

The STMS Lab

Organizational Chart

L'art au temps de l'IA. Générer, critiquer, créer / Encounter

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