It was during the second half of the twentieth century that musical acoustics and music research established themselves as fully fledged scientific disciplines, with the emergence, worldwide, of laboratories and studios devoted to the science of sound through the lens of musical practices. France made a major contribution to the institutionalisation of these fields of research, notably with the creation of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM) in 1958, the Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale (LAM) in 1963, and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in 1977, alongside many other structures that were founded up until the late 1980s.

How did these institutions come into being? What were their scientific objectives? What human and material resources did they have at their disposal? How did they position themselves in relation to one another? To answer these questions, researchers involved in the RAMHO project are conducting numerous semi-structured interviews with key historical figures from these various French institutions, while also consulting public and private archival collections in order to reconstruct, as accurately as possible, the history of these organisations and the scientific careers of their principal contributors.

In doing so, the RAMHO project fosters dialogue between musicologists, acousticians, computer scientists and historians of science on the plurality of scientific approaches to music, the diversity of technological tools involved, and the various roles attributed to what is known as musical acoustics and music research. A dedicated database will be developed to disseminate all the interviews conducted during the project and to share selected archival documents. In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2027, particular attention will be paid to the origins of IRCAM.