About


Fred Voisin is one of the pioneers of computer music. At the crossroads of artistic creation and scientific research, his career has led him to explore territories that few composers of his generation have ventured into, since the earliest days of computing applied to music.


Education and early research

After earning his Baccalauréat in Orsay in 1984, he began studying musicology at the Sorbonne – Paris IV, ethnolinguistics at Langues O' under Michèle Therrien, and met Jean Malaurie at the EHESS, where he trained in ethnomusicology and cognitive science. This dual culture, artistic and scientific, shaped the singularity of his approach from the outset.

An associate researcher at LACITO-CNRS from 1989 under the direction of Simha Arom, then a Fondation Fyssen fellow from 1992 to 1994, he carried out several field missions in Central Africa and Indonesia. It was there that he designed his first experimental computer devices for the study of traditional music — tools that foreshadowed a career entirely devoted to inventing instruments for research and creation. This research was quickly published both in MIT's Leonardo Music Journal and in Keyboards Magazine®. It was also the occasion for decisive encounters with figures such as Gyorgy Ligeti, Geneviève Dournon, Tran Van Khe, Louis Dandrel, Marc Chemillier, and Dan Sperber…

Ircam and the contemporary music scene

From 1995, composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière introduced him to Ircam – Centre Georges Pompidou, where he designed computer systems for musical creation, with Laurent Bayle and Gérard Assayag supporting his research. He also took part in numerous projects and concerts alongside Art Zoyd Studios (Maubeuge) and the Centre National de Création Musicale de Nice (CIRM), and worked with major figures of contemporary music and dance, notably: Daniel d'Adamo, Jean-Louis Agobet, Georges Aperghis, Maurice Benayoun, Allain Gaussin, Heiner Goebbels, Peter Greenaway, Myriam Gourfink, Gérard Hourbette, Atli Ingolfsson, Philippe Leroux, Martin Matalon, Emmanuel Nunes, Rachid Ouramdane, Horatiu Radulescu, Roger Reynolds, Terry Riley, Fausto Romitelli, Atau Tanaka, Giovanni Verrando, David Wessel and Iannis Xenakis, among others. His contribution has been recognized by a younger generation of composers, such as François Paris and Julien Vincenot, who each dedicated a work to him. His work at Ircam, notably around a device using 576 miniature loudspeakers, was the subject of a profile by Pierre Gervasoni in Le Monde on 3 April 2002, titled « Frédéric Voisin et le chant des disques durs » (Frédéric Voisin and the Song of Hard Drives).

Musical research and generative artificial intelligence

From 1999 to 2012, between concerts and master classes, he developed the Morphologie library for Ircam's OpenMusic environment, drawing on both his research in ethnomusicology and René Thom's work on mathematical morphology. He also designed the generative tool LabanOnLisp for choreographic composition, as well as the Neuromuse project, a system of neuromimetic networks for musical creation. It was as head of musical research at CIRM that he further developed this project and met Robin Meier: together, they produced pioneering musical installations in generative artificial intelligence, including Caresses de marquises (Nuit Blanche 2004, Gare de l'Est, Paris, under the artistic direction of Nicolas Frize), a twelve-hour performance-concert for artificial neural networks, Symphonie des machines (4th Dimension Festival, Sophia Antipolis, 2006), and Last Manoeuvres in the Dark (with Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2008). This research was also the occasion for other encounters, notably with François Pachet at the Sony Computer Science Lab. It now ranks among the early milestones of AI applied to sound creation.

Teaching and applied research

From 2007 to 2020, he taught composition at the Conservatoire du Pays de Montbéliard, within the universities of Bourgogne, Saint-Étienne and Montbéliard, and led workshops in Paris, Nice, Milan, Venice and Taipei. At the same time, he worked as an engineer on several applied research projects on digital audio devices for cognitive rehabilitation, in collaboration with CNRS, ENSAM, the Université de Bourgogne and INSERM. This work led him, as an independent researcher, to design a device of virtual soundscapes, known as Madeleines sonores (cf. Plan Sonore, Santé Mentale), intended for nursing-home residents with Alzheimer's disease, and to lead clinical studies — a direct and deeply human application of decades of research on sound, memory and cognition.

His research on generative processes also extends into public space, through permanent sound installations. This is the case with Fonocanal, a permanent sound installation on a bank of the Canal de Bourgogne, inaugurated near lock n°92 in 2021: it continuously broadcasts sounds generated in situ and in real time, drawn from the weather, the seasons, the time of day, stochastic processes, and sound archives from the Maison du Patrimoine Oral de Bourgogne.

A body of work at the crossroads of disciplines

From field ethnomusicology to generative artificial intelligence, by way of contemporary composition and applied medical research, Fred Voisin's career traces a rare trajectory: that of an artist-researcher for whom technology has never been an end in itself, but always an instrument in the service of understanding sound, memory and creation. This trajectory would later lead him, in Marseille in 2019 at the Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research, to finally meet John Chowning, the founding figure of computer music to whom we owe FM sound synthesis — a technique in which, without knowing it at the time, he had taken his very first steps in electronic music.

This curiosity extends well beyond the musical field alone: as a child, in a quarry wedged between two motorways south of Paris, he discovered with his friend Pascal Dusarget, around 1978, several fossil skeletons of Halitherium schinzi, a marine mammal ancestor of dugongs, manatees and other sirenians, aged 30 to 60 million years. This adventure led him to meet the paleontologist Herbert Thomas at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, who encouraged them to donate a fifth, nearly complete skeleton to the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia, where it is now preserved and exhibited under the care of paleontologist Fabrizio Bizzarini and referenced on Google Arts & Culture.

The works and tools are gathered in dedicated pages; the full bibliography appears below.

Publications

Bibliography compiled from HAL, ORCID (0000-0002-7879-5304), Google Scholar and Ircam.

Journal articles

Conference proceedings

Books & chapters

Research reports

Other documents

Press

Langue/Language : FR