Born in Strasbourg, Royer first studied piano with the concert pianist and Schumann interpreter Hélène Boschi.
[1][2] As a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture in Paris, he passed the State Music Teacher Examination in 1987 and received his degree in the main subject viola at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.
After his studies he founded together with the Brazilian pianist Paulo Álvares[4] the group ALEA - an ensemble for collective musical composition and Improvisation.
Thus the French music magazine Le Monde de la musique awarded the highest mark for Lignes.
[9] In 2013 he gave further master classes at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln,[10] in 2014 at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel, in 2015 at the Viola Moderna Festival at the Folkwang Universität and the same year at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal.
"Traverse" was honoured in 2000 by the "International Computer Music Conference" in Berlin, and "Lumen" (2003) for viola and electronics was created in 2003 at the "Centre Henri Pousseur"[12] in Liège, with which Royer has been associated since 2001.
The most important are Pascal Dusapin, Luc Ferrari, Gérard Grisey, Victor Kissine, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Claude Ledoux, Horațiu Rădulescu, Michael Riessler [de], Vinko Globokar, Fabrizio Cassol, David Shea [de; fr], Robert HP Platz, Frederic D'Haene,[22] Christophe Bertrand and Ken Ueno.