Emmanuel Ponsot 

CNRS Researcher in Auditory Psychophysics & Modeling

STMS Lab (Ircam/CNRS/Sorbonne Université, Paris, FR)

Emmanuel.Ponsot@ircam.fr


I am a CNRS researcher working in the Perception & Sound Design Team of the STMS lab at Ircam, Paris.

NEWS: We have a 2-year funded postdoctoral position available in the lab! Full details here: full postdoc offer

AN APPROACH TO CHARACTERIZE the mechanisms of human auditory perception 


Computational psychophysics in humans.

A key question at the core of our research is: Why do identical auditory stimuli often lead to different perceptual outcomes between individuals? In order to understand where and how these processing differences may emerge, we are studying how the human auditory system and the brain process complex acoustical signals such as speech, at both peripheral and central levels. To do so, we rely on an interdisciplinary integrated approach combining experimental (psychophysics and EEG) and computational modeling techniques, a requirement if we aim to provide a clear mechanistic account of the phenomena under study. For example, we have conducted research on loudness coding of dynamic sounds (and its underlying cortical computations), spectrotemporal modulation processing, and social attributions from speech prosody


A research with both basic and clinical perspectives in audition.

These experiments are conducted in the lab with healthy individuals as well as in different clinical contexts, in order to better understand how different disorders such are sensorineural deficits or brain lesions impact the different stages of auditory processing. A common objective of this research is to develop novel experimental tools and approaches for characterizing supra-threshold auditory processes. In the end, some of these tools can also be adapted to provide clinicians with finer characterization of auditory deficits than current clinical tests, and thus contribute to the development of individually-tailored computational audiological strategies.