An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field.
-Niels Bohr
Dr. Ir. Stéphane Pigeon, research engineer & sound designer

A Short Biography

Stéphane Pigeon was born in Brussels, Belgium, in December 1970 and received the degree of electrical engineering from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in June 1994, with a specialization in signal processing.

He worked at the Laboratoire de Télécommunications et Télédétection (TELE) of this same university from 1995 till 1999, first studying the relative merits of different scanning formats in the context of the MPEG2 codec optimization - a work carried out in the framework of the HAMLET European project - then working in the field of multimodal biometric person authentication during the course of the M2VTS European project. He finalized a PhD thesis on this last topic in 1999.

Then, Stéphane joined the Royal Military Academy as a part-time researcher, working on various topics such as computer-assisted person identification, data fusion, channel coding and audio processing. His last years were related to speech segmentation and language identification.

In parallel, he worked as a consultant, exclusively for Roland Corporation in the area of the musical instrument market.

His spare time has always been devoted to trying out new ideas. He has been active in the sonic branding business for a couple of years, and released some iOS apps. He designed various audio-related websites.

In 2015, Stéphane resigned from his job at the Belgian Defence. That same year, a restructuration inside Roland Corp. cost Stéphane his exclusive consultant job. Fortunately, one of his websites - myNoise.net - became a hit that same year, reaching the TOP 10,000 most visited websites in the US.

Today, Stéphane devotes most of his time developing myNoise, the premier source of non-distracting noises and music. This project lives off its users donations.

Stéphane still works as a consultant. He is open to collaborations in the field of audio processing. Sound processing for healthcare applications, represents one of his recent favorite topics. And his heart still belongs to the programming of sounds for electronic music instruments.

He is married and has three children.

Current Positions

2014-... Owner | myNoise
2010-... Consultant | Audio Processing | Varied clients

Successful Experiences

2018 Apple App of the Day | myNoise
1999-2015 Researcher | Royal Military Academy | Belgian Defense.
1998-2015 Exclusive Sound Designer | Roland Corporation
1999-2014 Belgian delegate | Speech and Language Technology Research Group | NATO
2010 Expert | Agence Nationale de la Recherche
2010 Invited Professor | Collège Belgique | Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
2004-2009 Reviewer | Pattern Recognition Letters | Elsevier
1994-1999 Research assistant | Laboratoire de Télécommunications et Télédétection | UCL

Valuable Experiences

Because each failure teaches something new...

2010 iOS Developer | Wild Contacts
2009-2011 Creative Director | Audible Brands (now sold)
1994 Junior consultant | Experteam

Compatibility Test

Signals oscillating between twenty and twenty thousand times a second are my favorites. I often team up with Nyquist and Shannon when projects need to be discrete, or with Fourier when time doesn't matter. My lucky numbers are 44 100 and 65 535.

If this all makes sense to you, you just confirmed we are speaking the same language. If not, I will probably look to you as someone who pretends to work when I listen to music...

Education

1999 PhD in Applied Science | Université Catholique de Louvain
1994 MSc in Engineering | Université Catholique de Louvain

Computer Skills

Google Search and Plain Text Editing, preferably with a text editor that offers syntax highlighting in computer languages such as Matlab, JavaScript, PHP, and HTML.