Gerard Assayag

Gerard Assayag is head of the Music Representation Research Group at IRCAM in Paris, and head of the STMS (Sciences and Technologies of Music and Sound) Ircam/CNRS Lab.

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 the standard for computational composition and musicology. .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.

Recently Gerard Assayag has created with other colleagues the OMax computational improvisation system based on machine listening / machine learning which has become a recognized reference in the field.