Stephen McAdams

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About

Stephen McAdams stands as a towering figure in the cognitive psychology of music, whose pioneering work has fundamentally shaped our understanding of how listeners perceive and organize musical sound. His research masterfully bridges auditory perception, music cognition, and music technology, exploring how the human mind extracts structure from complex acoustic signals. McAdams is best known for his foundational contributions to the study of auditory scene analysis in music—how we segregate simultaneous sound sources and integrate them into coherent streams. He has also made seminal advances in understanding timbre perception, musical emotion, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying musical tension and expectation. With over 15,000 citations, his work has profoundly influenced fields from psychoacoustics to computer music. A former director of the renowned Music Perception and Cognition team at IRCAM, McAdams has been instrumental in fostering dialogue between scientists and composers. His recent editorial work continues to champion the integration of music technology with cognitive science, ensuring that his legacy of rigorous, creative inquiry inspires the next generation of researchers.