An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr

A Short Biography

Stéphane Pigeon

I was born in 1970 in Brussels, Belgium, and trained as an electrical engineer at UCLouvain, specializing in signal processing (M.Eng., 1994). From 1995 to 1999, I worked at the university’s Telecommunications Laboratory on European research projects, including scanning-format evaluation for MPEG-2 optimization (HAMLET) and multimodal biometric person authentication (M2VTS). I completed my PhD in 1999 on multimodal biometric authentication.

I later joined the Royal Military Academy, the Belgian Defence university, as a part-time researcher. My work covered computer-assisted identification, data fusion, channel coding, and audio processing, with my later years focused on speech segmentation and language identification.

In parallel, I consulted for Roland Corporation in the musical instrument market, which aligned with a lifelong passion for music and sound design.

In 2015, I transitioned to independent work, dedicating my efforts to developing myNoise, an audio platform I created. myNoise offers interactive soundscapes and customizable noise generators designed to promote focus, sleep, relaxation, and effective sound masking. Every day, over 15,000 people use myNoise. Thanks to the incredible support from this community, I am able to work full-time on maintaining and growing the project.

Although my time is limited, I remain open to collaborations that closely match what I do: audio processing, especially projects linked to healthcare applications and music instrument sound design.

Current Positions

2014–… Owner and lead developer • myNoise
2010–… Consultant • Varied clients

Past Experiences

1999–2015 Researcher • Royal Military Academy • Belgian Defense
1999–2015 Belgian Representative • Speech and Language Technology Research Group • NATO
1998–2014 Exclusive Sound Designer • Roland Corporation
2010 Expert • Agence Nationale de la Recherche • France
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 • UCLouvain

Education

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

Compatibility Test

Signals oscillating between 20 and 20,000 times per second are my favorite. I often team up with Nyquist and Shannon when a project needs 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’ve just confirmed we speak the same language. If not, don’t worry. It just means I may look like I’m listening to music when I’m actually working—or, quite possibly, doing both…

Computer Skills

For scientific work, I moved from MATLAB to Julia over the years. And I’m impressed by how far modern PHP and JavaScript has come: it is now realistic to run research-grade projects entirely in the browser. I often deliver browser-based prototypes to clients that work immediately, without installing anything on their side. So, these days, I spend most of my time with JavaScript, HTML, and PHP.