Sound Designer and Music Composer, Cécile Le Prado is a member of CEDRIC (cedric.cnam.fr), the computer science laboratory of the Cnam (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, France, www.cnam.fr). Since 2001, she served as an assistant professor at Cnam in charge of the sound design department in the Master for Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN, www.enjmin.fr). Since 2015, she has been a professor of sound design at CGL. Her Ph.D. thesis was titled “Designing Sound: Between Determinism, Emergence and Interactivity”.
Education and Professional Experience
Cecile obtained her degree in Electro-Acoustic Composition in 1983 at the “Conservatoire de Musique de Nantes”, and her Ph.D. in computer science at Cnam in 2013. She worked as an independent composer and designer for choreography, theater, short films, and documentary and was awarded with several prizes. In recent years, Cecile mainly focused on sound installations in relation to urban soundscapes and interactive listening situations inspired by games linked to her Ph.D. research. The successive encounters with research and creation centers such as INA-GRM (www.inagrm.com), and IRCAM (ww.ircam.fr), emphasized the predominant role of sound spatialization as a parameter in musical composition. Influenced by her teaching position in the domain of games and interactive media, Cecile now focuses on real and virtual soundscapes, and in multiple listening modes applied to linear and dynamic media.
Teaching
Since 2001, Cecile has been an associate professor at the Cnam in Paris. During her time in this role, she created the sound design department of the National School for Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN). She now co-directs this sound department alongside Vincent Percevault, director of G4F sound studio. She joined the CGL team in 2015. Cecile’s pedagogy in both schools relies on the same principles: encourage creativity, and curiosity in theoretical aspects (perception, acoustics, film, and game analysis), and practical aspects (understanding methods and practices of game sound). She aims to encourage deep listening awareness even for students not specialized in sound.
Research Priorities
As a member of the CEDRIC laboratory, Cecile belongs to the ILJ team (Interface to read and play). There, she works on interactive sound design. Her Ph.D. research investigated the composer’s point of view and writing style in emergent and interactive sound and music compositions. Her topics of interest include urban games, augmented reality games (ARG), augmented audio in urban spaces, and political games.
