Gerard Assayag, an Ircam research director, is head of IRCAM Music Representation Team, a team he has founded in 1992. He has been head of the Ircam research lab (STMS, a joint lab between Ircam, CNRS and Sorbonne University) between 2011 and 2017.
His research interests are centered on music representation issues, including programming languages, machine learning, constraint and visual programming, computational musicology, music modeling, and computer-assisted composition and interaction. He has designed with his collaborators OpenMusic and OMax, two music research software environments which have gained international reputation and are used in many places for computer assisted composition, analysis and improvisation.
Assayag is a co-founder of Collegium Musicae, the Sorbonne University Institute for Music Sciences ; he has participated to the kick-off of the Sorbonne Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) where he has strongly contributed to define the Digital Humanity Axis programme. He has co-founded the French Society for Computer Music (AFIM) as well as the International learned Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM) and its associated, first-of-kind, peer-reviewed Journal of Mathematics and Music (JMM), now a pillar of the research community in music computing. Assayag serves in the Editorial Boards JMM, of the Journal of New Music Research (JNMR) and of the Springer Computational Music Science Series. He has organized or co-organised the "Forum Diderot, Mathematique et Musique" for the European Mathematical Society in 1999 as well as several international computer music conferences, including the Sound and Music Computing 2004 conference, the 3rd Mathematics and Computation in Music conference in 2011, the Mathemusical Conversation Intl Workshop in Singapour in 2015, the Improtech Paris - New York 2012, Paris-Philadelphia 2017 and Paris-Athina 2019 conference / festival on Improvisation an new technologies.
Gerard Assayag has been co-editor of several journal special issues on music science such as JNMR or Soft Computing, and of books including Mathematic and Music (Springer-Verlag 1999), The OM Composer's Book I, II & III (Delatour 2006-2016), New Computational Paradigms for Computer Music (Delatour 2009), Constraint Programming in Music (Wiley 2012), Mathemusical Conversations (World Scientific 2016).
Assayag has defined through theoretical publications and popular technologies such as OpenMusic and Omax the concept of symbolic interaction to account for rich and versatile musical dialog between machines and humans, traversing several levels and scales of information structure, from acoustic signal to higher symbolic and cognitive ones. His conceptions are now evolving towards general Co-Creativity in Cyber-Human Workship, aiming at shaping the next generation of human-machine artistic interaction.
Learn More :
On Co-Creativity Modeling Improvisation MOOC Music Research
Workshop - Festival Improtech VIDEOS
Music Representation team RepMus (new page)