The STMS Lab

(Science and Technology of Music and Sound)

Director: Brigitte d'Andréa-Novel
Deputy Director: Nicolas Misdariis

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), INSIS, and INSHS as well as the Sorbonne University engineering school.

The laboratory is made up of the following research teams:

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.

STMS-Lab website