Lorenzi obtained a PhD in experimental psychology from Université Lyon 2 in 1995[2] for his work on "Codage de la modulation d'amplitude dans le système auditif: expériences psychoacoustiques et modélisation physiologique" (coding of amplitude modulation in the auditory system: psychoacoustical experiments and physiological modelling).

He then spent a year as a postdoc at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK, where he worked with Roy D. Patterson on the perception of temporally asymmetric envelopes[3] and click trains.

[8] Sounds such as speech, music and natural soundscapes are decomposed by the peripheral auditory system of humans (the cochlea) into narrow frequency bands.

Starting from the late nineties, Lorenzi conducted a research program on auditory perception combining signal processing, psychophysical, electrophysiological and computational methods based on this envelope/TFS dichotomy.

His psychophysical conducted on normal-hearing people and patients with cochlear or brain lesions is consistent with the idea that, as in vision, nonlinear mechanisms along the auditory pathway generate an audible distortion component at the 2nd-order AM frequency in the internal modulation spectrum of sounds.