Jean Bresson [personal page]

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I am a computer music researcher and software engineer: this page is a hub for links and resources related to some present and past activity.

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 developer and researcher in charge of the OpenMusic project, and my principal contribution to it has 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

→ Full 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 – 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

I am currently in the steering committees of:

TENOR Internation Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (General Chair).
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 also coordinated a number of past events and research groups or seminars, such as:

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).