Jean Bresson [personal page]

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I 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 software engineer 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 to it have 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 at CNMAT / UC Berkeley with a Fulbright research scholarship. In 2018-2019 I was also part-time guest lecturer at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikinformatik of the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe.

Current projects

OM#
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.)

OM#

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

→ List of 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

TENOR (Internation Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation)
– Founding member (2015) and general chair (2018-2021) of the conference steering committee.

I am also currently in the steering committees of:

FARM: ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modelling and Design.
AFIM : French Computer Music Association.

As for 2020-2021, I am in the scientific committee of:

FARM 2021, 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design | Online.
Sound and Music Computing: SMC’20 / SMC’21, Torino, Italy | Online (Senior Scientific Committe).
TENOR 2020/2021, Hamburg, Germany.
ACM SPLASH 2020 | Onward! Essays, Chicago, USA | Online.
Journées d’Informatique Musicale: JIM 2020 / JIM 2021 | Online.

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)
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)

Students and PhD supervision

Currently:

Martin Fouilleul, 2019-…, PhD IRCAM / STMS lab (Sorbonne Université, Paris): Architecture and language for distributed temporal flow management, and applications to multimedia creation (co-direction with Jean-Louis Giavitto).
Amir Teymuri, 2020-2021, MS Institut für Musikinformatik und Musikwissenschaft, Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe: Symbolic Music Typesetting.

Previously:

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 / 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 (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).