Innovations
Engaged with societal and economic issues at the intersection of culture and IT, research at Ircam has forged a reputation for itself in the world of international research as an interdisciplinary benchmark in the science and technology of sound and music, constantly attentive to the new needs and uses in society.
The dynamics of innovation at Ircam are underpinned by an original model focusing on contemporary creation. Close collaboration between artists and scientists at the cutting edge of their fields has yielded inventions for sound production, whose works are advanced prototypes. Engineering processes implemented tend to both extrapolate and pool the novel artistic approaches in generic concepts and instantiate them in forms suitable for broader usage.
The Ircam Forum acts as a meeting place for the international community of Ircam software users and is the first circle for the dissemination of technologies beyond in-house artistic production. Forum members, mostly students and professionals - artists, teachers, scientists and engineers - have access to technology in its most open and experimental forms: the degree of openness and programmability of the environments means they can be adapted to a diverse range of aesthetic approaches. The Forum is also a community network in which its members can share their own technological and artistic output.
Industrial collaborations account for a significant share of Ircam activity, whether as part of collaborative R&D projects, research services and theses supervised jointly with research teams. The production of commercial software collections, conducted in collaboration with renowned players (Flux::, Amadeus, Ableton, Plugivery etc.), makes it possible to circulate technology among various target users.
Ircam Amplify is an Ircam subsidiary founded in 2019, in charge of marketing the know-how and technology produced in the laboratory, in the form of services and products. Bridging state-of-the-art audio research and the world of industry at a global level, Ircam Amplify is an active participant in the sound revolution of the 21st century, while creative and cultural industries have taken on growing strategic importance in national and European economies. Industries such as transportation and haulage, luxury and healthcare are increasingly aware that sound is an essential component of all human experience. The original approach developed at Ircam focusing on sound design, combining aesthetics and functionality in design to contribute to of the sound dimension of our day-to-day environment, also responds to this growing awareness.
Looking beyond the artistic and industrial application of its research, Ircam’s 40+ years of accumulated experience in methods to explore connections between scientific research, artistic creation and industrial leveraging is generating growing interest in society to implement processes for open innovation and the setup of new interdisciplinary networks, as part of European projects, with the organisation of meetups and the provision of cultural engineering services.
