Nicolas Misdariis is Research Director at Ircam and head of the Perception & Sound Design team at the STMS Laboratory. After graduating from an engineering school specializing in mechanics, he obtained his Master's degree in acoustics at the Acoustics Laboratory of the University of Maine (LAUM, Le Mans), then his PhD thesis at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM - Paris) and finally his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) on the theme of Sound Design Sciences. He has been working at Ircam as a researcher since 1995. He contributed, in 1999, to the introduction of sound design at Ircam (Sound Design team /L. Dandrel), then to its evolution in 2004 (PDS team /P. Susini). During these years, he developed research work and industrial applications in relation to sound synthesis and reproduction, perception of everyday sounds and sound environments, human-machine interfaces (HMI) as well as interactive sonification and sound design. Since 2010, he has also been a part-time lecturer in the framework of the sound design course at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art de Design du Mans (ESAD TALM, Le Mans).
Patrick Susini, PhD in Acoustics, obtains an HDR in 2011 on "Sound design: an experimental and applicative framework to explore sound perception". He is in charge of the Perception and Sound Design team from 2004 to 2019, which receives the CIDB's Decibel d'Or Recherche 2014. In 2016, he obtained the rank of Director of Research at Ircam, and the Chasse de la Société Française d'Acoustique prize. He has coordinated several national (PREDIT, RNRT, ANR), European (FP6-NEST-PATH, FET-Open) and industrial (Renault, PSA, EDF, SNCF) projects. He teaches in several Masters (ACAR/SU, Musicology and Sound Design/Aix-Marseille, Sound Design/ESAD). His current research topics concern the study of temporal processes in the global perception of sound sequences, and the perceptive, acoustic and semantic representations of sounds.
Diemo Schwarz, born in Germany in 1969, is a researcher at IRCAM, and a musician and creative programmer. His scientific research on sound analysis/synthesis and gestural control of interaction with music is the basis of his artistic work, and allows to bring advanced and fun musical interaction to expert musicians and the general public via installations like the dirty tangible interfaces (DIRTI) and augmented reality (Topophonie mobile). In 2017 he was DAAD Edgar-Varèse guest professor for computer music at TU Berlin. He performs on his own digital musical instrument based on his CataRT open source software, exploring different collections of sound with the help of gestural controllers that reconquer musical expressiveness and physicality for the digital instrument, bringing back the immediacy of embodied musical interaction to the rich sound worlds of digital sound processing and synthesis. He interprets and performs improvised electronic music as member of the 30-piece ONCEIM improvisers orchestra, or with musicians such as Frédéric Blondy, Richard Scott, Gael Mevel, Pascal Marzan, Massimo Carrozzo, Nicolas Souchal, Fred Marty, Hans Leeuw. He composes for dance and performance (Sylvie Fleury, Frank Leibovici), video (Benoit Gehanne and Marion Delage de Luget), and installation (C
Sound Perception & Design team – software development news
Within the frame of an articulation between research in perception and sound design, the SPD team has developed since few times – but on the basis of previous studies especially related to the verbalization and perception of environmental sounds timbre – methodological tools for sound design, namely linked with the issue of prototyping and sketching. At the present step, two specific software environments will be presented and detailed : - Speak : a sound lexicon that gives access to the definition of a series of terms describing the main sound properties and thus allowing a shared understanding of the sonic phenomenon in the aim of expert listening or collaborative design, for instance. Each term of the lexicon (based on a review of the academic literature [Carron et al., 2017]) is illustrated with several sounds created or recorded under the supervision of composer Roque Rivas. The terms and associated sound examples are presented in an interface (Max patch) developed by Frederic Voisin, which allows to add new terms and sounds quite easily (configuration protocol using CSV files). The principle of this tool and its last developments has been used in several sound design project recently implemented. - SkataRT : a tool for sound exploration and quick prototyping that allows to realise sonic sketches on the basis of vocal imitations. This approach, based on a collaborative research work (Skat-VG project) has recently been implemented in a "Max for Live" device developed by Manuel Poletti and Thomas Goepfer (Music Unit), also in close collaboration with ISMM team. Moreover, the SkataRT tool is based on a corpus-based synthesis approach (CataRT) that allows to interpret the production of a vocal imitation in terms of a certain number of significant acoustic features, regarding spectrum, transient or pitch. The main motivation for the development of this sonic sketch approach in the Live framework is to give the sound designers a conventional and practical workflow – a validation in terms of usage and ergonomics is, in addition, planned to be developed in the near future of the project.