Jean Bresson [personal page]
GitHub | HAL | Google Scholar | LinkedIn | Academia.eduI am a computer music researcher and software engineer: this page contains resources and links to some present and past activity and projects.
I am currently working at Ableton, as a team Product Owner on the company’s flagship software, Live.
Before that — from 2003 to 2019 — I was at IRCAM in the Music Representations team of the STMS lab (Science and Technology of Music and Sound). My main focus and expertise is in computer-assisted music composition and domain-specific (visual) programming: I was the principal developer and researcher in charge of the OpenMusic project since 2008. My principal contributions consisted in connecting the environment to digital sound processing, spatialization, and real-time interaction systems (see the projects page).
I obtained my PhD from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, and my Habilitation degree (HDR) in 2017. In 2016 I was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship carried out at CNMAT / UC Berkeley, USA. In 2018-2019 I was also part-time guest lecturer at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikinformatik of the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Projects
| OM# |
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OM# is a computer assisted composition and visual programming environment derived from OpenMusic (see past projects), featuring a fully redesigned visual programming framework, as well as advanced tools for interactive computer assisted composition and digital signal processing. The environment was initially concieved as a new implementation of OpenMusic. Key features and developments were carried out during the EFFICACe research project (2013-2017), while exploring interactive approaches in computer-assisted music composition processes: timeline-based interactive control of musical objects, dynamic scheduling architecture for musical rendering and computation, new interfaces for the temporal representation of compositional processes. The "reactive" model, previously introduced as a prototype in OpenMusic, was also integrated as a native feature. After successive code-names (om7-beta/o7/...) the project was named OM# (om-sharp) shortly before the v1.0 release in the end of 2019. → om-sharp project page (incl. downloads, documentation, etc.) |
| More: → Other/past projects I've been working on... |
Publications
Habilitation Thesis / Mémoire d’Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (2017):
Composition assistée par ordinateur : techniques et outils de programmation visuelle pour la création musicale / Computer-assisted composition: visual programming techniques and tools for musical creation (in French) [PDF].
- The OM Composer’s Book, co-edited with Carlos Agon and Gérard Assayag – A series of 3 books about OpenMusic and its use by composers
- Special issue of Journal of New Music Research (46-1): Interactive Composition, co-edited with Joel Chadabe, 2017.
- Special issue of Technique et Science Informatique (TSI) (33-7/8): Informatique Musicale, co-edited with Dominique Fober, 2014.
Community
In 2015, together with a few colleagues from the French Computer Music Association (AFIM), I participated in the creation of TENOR, the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation. I was the general chair of the conference steering committee between 2018 and 2021, and still a member of this committee until 2024.
I am also part of the steering committee of AFIM, the French Computer Music Association.
Between 2017 and 2023 I was in the FARM steering committee (ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modelling and Design).
I was the coordinator of the following events, research groups or seminars:
- MaMuX: Mathematics, Music and relations to other disciplines (2011-2014, IRCAM, Paris — 8 annual half-day sessions, 80+ speakers).
- MusICAL network Seminar Series on Interaction, Calculus, Algorithmics and Languages applied to Music [FR] (2015-2018).
- New spaces of music notation work group of the AFIM (French computer music association) (2013-2015)
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MCM International conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (2011, IRCAM, Paris).
- Research workshops:
- Interactivity in Music Composition and Performance (CIRMMT / McGill University, Montreal, Canada 2015)
- Human-Computer Interactions in Music (CNMAT / UC Berkeley, USA 2016)
- Music Composition and Creative Interaction with Machine Learning (Sound and Music Computing, Limassol, Cyprus 2018)
Research supervision
Funded research (Coordinator and PI):
- EFFICACe: New paradigms for computer-aided music composition (2013-2017).
French National Research Agency (ANR) Young Research Programme for Exploratory and Emerging Research (JCJC). - PACO: Artificial Intelligence and Computer-Assisted Composition (2018-2019).
CNRS “PEPS” (start-up) program for exploratory projects (with focus on artificial intelligence). UMR 9912 STMS.
PhD Direction and Supervision:
- Marlon Schumacher, PhD McGill University (Montreal, CA): A Framework for Computer-Aided Composition of Space, Gesture, and Sound. Co-supervision / dir.: Marcelo Wanderley, Sean Ferguson. 2016.
- Charles de Paiva Santana, PhD Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, FR) / University of Campinas (Brasil). International Doctoral Program of the Research Institute for Development (IRD): The Musical Score as an Instance: Essays in Computer-Assisted Analysis. Co-supervision / dir.: Moreno Andreatta, Jônatas Manzolli. 2016
- Dimitri Bouche, PhD IRCAM / STMS lab (Sorbonne Université, Paris): Interactive compositional processes : a framework for programming and rendering musical structures. 2016.
- Martin Fouilleul, PhD IRCAM / STMS lab (Sorbonne Université, Paris): A temporal programming environment for live shows and art installations. Co-supervision Jean-Louis Giavitto. 2023.
- Antoine Caillon, PhD IRCAM / STMS lab (Sorbonne Université, Paris): Hierarchical temporal learning for multi-instrument and orchestral audio synthesis. Co-direction Philippe Esling. 2023.