viterbi early career chair 2005-2006 lecture series: gerard assayag: about the speaker

Gerard Assayag is currently head of the Music Representation Research Group at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, and Directeur de Recherches associe for the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).

Born in 1960, he studied computer science, music and linguistics. In 1980, while still a student, he won research awards in "Art and the Computer", a national software contest launched in 1980 by the French Ministry of Research, and another one in the "Concours Micro", a contest in computing in the arts using early micro-computers.

In the mid-eighties, he wrote the first IRCAM environment for score-oriented Computer Assisted Composition. In the mid-nineties he created, with Carlos Agon, the OpenMusic environment which is currently used by numerous composers and musicologists around the world. The concept behind OpenMusic is to provide a visual counterpart of major programming paradigms (such as functional, object and logical programming) along with an extensive set of musical classes and methods, plus an original metaphor for representing musical time in its logical, as well as chronological, aspects. OpenMusic is now taught in several prestigious universities and institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, IRCAM, Conservatoire de Paris, Technischen Universitat Berlin, University of Wisconsin, University of Cincinnati, and the Sibelius Academy in Finland.

Gerard Assayag is currently in charge of ATIAM, an MS/PhD program in Acoustics, Signal Processing, and Computer Science Applied to Music. ATIAM is co-organized by IRCAM , Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, and Telecom Paris. Created twelve years ago, ATIAM has produced graduated approximately eighty PhD's in computer music, signal processing, acoustics and psychoacoustics.

Gerard Assayag's research interests center on music representation issues, and include computer language paradigms, machine learning, constraint and visual programming, computational musicology, music modeling, and computer-assisted composition. His research results are regularly published in proceedings, books and journals.

Gerard Assayag is a founding member of the AFIM (Association Francaise d'Informatique Musicale), and member of the FWO Society on Foundations of Music Research. He has organized the "Forum Diderot, Mathematique et Musique" for the European Mathematical Society in 1999 (published as a book by Springer Verlag 2001) as well as several international computer music conferences, including the Sound and Music Computing 2004 conference, which included a preceding international workshop/concert on improvisation with the computer. Recently, he has participated in the founding of The Journal of Mathematics and Music project, whose affiliates come from institutions such as IRCAM, Yale University, and the Eastman School of Music.

In the recent years, Gerard Assayag has carried out research and developed software in style modeling and computer improvisation. His recent papers with his co-authors include "Using Factor Oracles for Machine Improvisation" in Soft Computing, "Using Machine-Learning Methods for Musical Style Modeling" in IEEE Computer, "Computer Assisted Composition at IRCAM : PatchWork & OpenMusic" in the Computer Music Journal, and "Mathematics and Music, A Diderot Mathematical Forum" published by Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

speaker: [ assayag ] pianist: [ thurmond ] info: [ abstracts | poster(pdf) ] organizer: [ chew ] links: [ top | series ]