As expected from an academic engineering context, most graduate and undergraduate courses in acoustics are rooted in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) teaching. Although our aim is not to criticize such teaching models, they somehow suffer from a weak point observed in STEM teaching. Indeed, this STEM perspective may limit the larger perspective on the topics and may also be less appealing for underrepresented groups in STEM and higher education. With this in mind, a new course was created at Université de Sherbrooke as part of the courses offer related to the Groupe d'Acoustique de l'Université de Sherbrooke. Entitled "Perception, qualité et design sonores" [Sound perception, sound quality, and sound design], this course proposes a transverse and trans/multidisciplinary perspective on sound sciences without any prerequisites. Here, the starting point is not STEM or equations, but personal and perceptual experience with sound. The course proceeds from a progressive mixture of declarative knowledge to integration and experiential learning, it also relies on the diversity of students' background as a multidisciplinary driving force. Topics range from hearing, sound quality, statistics, programming, sound design and film sound, sound/cultural studies, to sound technology. Using exploratory teaching tools (selfies, digital portfolio, flipped classroom, sound sketches), this learning experience was intended to immerse students in a wide pool of topics and ideas as a starting point. Next, an underlying characteristic of the course is that the student's assessment is based on appropriation assignments and projects, e.g. students have to be inspired by the various topics and conceptualize a new technology or invention with a creative, cross-disciplinary and critical thinking perspective. In this paper, the course and teaching tools are further presented. Results, example of works, and anecdotal evidence are reported to evaluate to success of this multidisciplinary path and integrated teaching experiment in the classroom.
