(formerly Stéphanie Wilain)
Stéphane is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM). Her research interests lie in the field of systematic musicology, focusing on embodied music cognition, extended reality (XR, encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality), and interactions and deep listening experiences within digitally augmented musical environments.
She is currently working as a PhD student for the MusiXR project, an interdisciplinary research project aiming at developing and improving musical concert experiences in XR. Her work consists of testing empirically different music concert scenarios in XR to better understand the behaviour, cognition, and emotion of users (musicians and listeners) engaged in such XR music concert experiences.
She obtained her master's in the cognitive neuroscience of music at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2020. She developed a new psychometric instrument assessing the multimodal mental imagery experience of music listening. Her master's project was nominated for Best Paper Award at the conference ICMPC-ESCOM16 in July 2021.
Before turning to music cognition research, Stéphane occupied various positions such as designer, freelance photographer, and creative assistant in architecture. And before that, she worked as an analyst for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris and the United Nations in Montreal. She holds a bachelor's degree in international affairs from HEC Montréal, a master's degree in geoeconomics and economic intelligence from the Catholic University of Paris, and a certificate in design and applied arts. She followed the Secondary IV piano programme of the McGill Schulich School of Music as an external candidate and is self-taught in guitar and drums.
Passionate about exploring the intersections of knowledge and the complexity of systems, Stéphane is committed to bringing together different disciplines from Art and Science and making complex knowledge accessible through science communication and research valorisation. When she is not at her desk sketchnoting, you can find Stéphane in music stores or planetariums. She still enjoys photography.
