Stephen McAdams studied music composition and theory with Julia Hansen at De Anza College in California (1971-1973) before entering the realm of perceptual psychology (BSc in Psychology, McGill University, 1977; PhD in Hearing and Speech Sciences, Stanford University, 1984). He also studied electronic music with alcides lanza and Edgar Valcárcel at McGill University in 1975-1976. In 1986, he founded the Music Perception and Cognition team at the world-renowned music research centre IRCAM-Centre Pompidou in Paris. While there he organized the first Music and the Cognitive Sciences conference in 1988, which subsequently gave rise to three international societies dedicated to music perception and cognition, as well as the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. He was Research Scientist and then Senior Research Scientist in the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) from 1989 to 2004. He took up residence at McGill University in 2004, where he is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition. He directed the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT) in the Schulich School of Music from 2004 to 2009 and has been directing the international ACTOR Partnership since 2018. His research interests include multimodal scene analysis, musical timbre perception, sound source perception, and the cognitive and affective dynamics of musical listening. He is currently working on a psychological foundation for a theory of orchestration.
