BVA ARCHIVE: Profiles
Sten Ternström (PEVoC6 plenary speaker)
Sten Ternström received his undergraduate training in Electronics Engineering at KTH. In 1980, he joined the KTH Music Acoustics research group in Stockholm for his master's thesis: a synthesiser of church bell sounds.
In 1982 he embarked on researching the acoustics of his major musical interest, choir singing, under the supervision of Johan ndberg. In 1989 Ternström defended his PhD thesis Acoustical Aspects of Choir Singing, which was the first major text on this subject. He continued to work on this topic during the 1990's and received the title of docent of Music Acoustics in 1999. Although choir acoustics might seem to be a narrow field, it provides a convenient theme for pursuing diverse interests in voice analysis, voice and music synthesis, room acoustics, audio signal processing and music perception. In parallel, Ternström's interest in engineering led him to spend many hundreds of evenings creating software for voice analysis and signal processing.
In the period 1994-1998 he co-founded and worked part-time in a small company to turn these ideas into products. The descendants of those systems are now in use at over a hundred academic and health-care sites, world-wide.
Since 2000, Ternström has been more involved with the teaching of music acoustics, sound, and audio technology, and with developing new courses, particularly for the School of Media Engineering at KTH. His most recent research projects have concerned voice usage in noisy workplaces, from an ergonomics perspective. Sten Ternström is an associate editor of Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Voice and the International Journal of Research in Choir Singing. He succeeded Professor Johan Sundberg as head of the KTH Music Acoustics Group in 2003.
Privately, Sten is of course a choir singer, and occasionally a composer, arranger and lyricist. He cheats on the clarinet and the guitar, and was a member of a rather successful a cappella vocal group called A la Carte, for its eight years of existence. His wife Gisela is a music teacher, and they live with their two daughters in Sollentuna, north of Stockholm.
