fred voisinFrequently asked questions about this site
What is this site?
This site presents thirty years of Fred Voisin's work at the crossroads of music, artificial intelligence and health — research, sound creations and scientific output. It brings together both artistic realizations (installations, performances, interactive devices) and applied research work (articles, publications, software tools).
Who is Fred Voisin?
An independent researcher associated with the CNRS since 1989, Fred Voisin works at the crossroads of ethnomusicology, musical artificial intelligence (neuromimetic networks, generative systems) and sound design applied to health. He has collaborated with institutions such as Ircam, Inserm, Arts et Métiers ParisTech, and CIRM. For a full biography and list of publications, see the About page.
What are the main sections of the site?
The site is organized around three main strands:
- Sound Design — in situ sound installations, sound identity and scenography, bespoke interactive devices for cultural venues, brands and local authorities.
- Research & Innovation — research work on artificial intelligence applied to sound, software tools, scientific publications.
- Sound, Health & Cognition — therapeutic sound devices (soundscapes for nursing homes, rehabilitation for cochlear-implanted children), associated clinical studies.
Who is this site for?
Depending on the section, the site addresses different audiences: artists, local authorities, cultural institutions, brands and festivals for sound design; laboratories, researchers and technical teams for research; healthcare institutions, nursing homes and research teams in neuroscience or gerontology for the Sound, Health & Cognition strand.
Where can I find publications and scientific references?
Each section lists its productions and associated publications directly on the page. A full bibliography (journal articles, conference proceedings, books, research reports) is also kept up to date on the About page.
Can I see concrete examples of the work?
Yes — each section documents its productions with dates, collaborators and links to external resources (press articles, project pages, code repositories). See for example Fonocanal, a permanent sound installation on the Canal de Bourgogne, or Madeleines sonores for Alzheimer's disease care. A Journal and a gallery complete these presentations. For an overview, the site map lists every page; a random page also lets you (re)discover the site by surprise, through its various corners.
Does the site exist in French?
Yes, every page has a French version, accessible via the FR link at the bottom of the page.
What happened to fredvoisin.net?
fredvoisin.net was this site's very first domain name, since 1999. Following some unfortunate domain-name management, it slipped out of his hands, and no longer points to the original site, now hosted at fredvoisin.com.
How can I contact Fred Voisin or propose a project?
Contact details and terms are listed on the About page.
Some background, and why this site is built the way it is
What is the difference between the Internet and the Web?
The two are often confused, but they are distinct things. The Internet is an infrastructure: a worldwide network of interconnected computers, able to carry data according to shared protocols (TCP/IP). The Web, meanwhile, is only one of the uses that runs over this infrastructure — alongside email or file sharing. The Web is a system of pages linked together by hyperlinks, browsed through a web browser. Without the Internet, there is no Web; but the Internet already existed, and would continue to exist, without the Web.
Since when has the Internet existed?
Its origins go back to ARPANET, a network created in 1969 by the American research agency ARPA (Department of Defense), linking four American universities. The TCP/IP protocol, which still structures the flow of data across the network today, was standardized in 1983 — the date conventionally taken as the birth of the Internet in its modern sense. Like many researchers, Fred Voisin got an Internet connection as soon as he joined the CNRS, in 1989, through an account at the université de Jussieu (jussieu.fr).
In France, before the Internet became mainstream, it was the Minitel that introduced the general public to online services. Launched by the French telecommunications operator from 1980 and rolled out massively over the following decade, this small telematic terminal, distributed free of charge in place of the paper phone directory, gave access to digitized services (directory, banking, press, messaging) over the telephone network. A precursor in many respects, the Minitel nonetheless relied on a closed infrastructure centralized by the national operator, the opposite of the Internet's open and decentralized model — which partly explains its gradual decline in the face of the Web through the 1990s and 2000s, until its final shutdown in 2012.
Since when has the Web existed?
The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, who proposed its principle in 1989 and put the first web page online in 1991. He went on to design the building blocks still in use today: the HTML language, the HTTP protocol, and the URL addressing system. The Web then spread quickly with the arrival of the first mainstream browsers in the mid-1990s. A little-known fact: the first web server and the first web browser were both developed on a NeXT machine, the computer designed by Steve Jobs's company after he left Apple. That same machine went on to have another life in the world of music research: it provided the hardware basis for Ircam's signal processing workstation (the ISPW, Ircam Signal Processing Workstation), used from the early 1990s for real-time digital audio processing and for developing the Max/FTS environment. Fred Voisin is probably one of the last people to have performed in concert with a NeXT machine in France, at Passerelle, centre d'art contemporain in Brest, around 2010, alongside composer Daniel D'Adamo, for the work d'Ombra I.
Why a personal site rather than a simple presence on social media?
A social network hosts content according to its own rules: a visibility algorithm, an imposed layout, short formats, older content disappearing or getting buried, and dependence on the platform's own longevity. A personal site, by contrast, remains the property of its author: structure, layout, addressing (URLs) and the long-term preservation of its content belong to them, independent of a third party's commercial choices or algorithmic changes.
What does a website's "independence" actually mean in practice?
In practice, it rests on several technical and editorial choices: hosting one's own domain name, producing pages that do not depend on any proprietary platform to exist or remain accessible, freely choosing one's own layout rather than an imposed template, and keeping control over the archiving and long-term preservation of one's content.
This idea is not new — it is in fact built into the founding philosophy of NeXT, the company Steve Jobs started after leaving Apple in 1985. NeXTSTEP, its operating system, was built on an object-oriented architecture designed to give every user the means to create and publish their own tools and content, rather than merely consume closed software. It was on this very machine that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web (see above) — a choice far from incidental, given how much the spirit of NeXTSTEP (openness, creative autonomy, object-oriented tools placed in the user's hands) already prefigured a Web where anyone could become a producer of pages, not just a reader.
This legacy carries directly into Mac OS X, NeXTSTEP's technical heir following Apple's acquisition of NeXT in 1997. The very earliest versions of Mac OS X (10.0 to 10.6, between 2001 and 2009) natively included a Personal Web Sharing feature, built on a local Apache server: every user had a ~/Sites folder on their own machine which they could turn on to publish their own personal website directly, with no third-party host. This feature, later extended by the iWeb application and .Mac/MobileMe hosting before being phased out in the 2010s in favor of centralized platforms, is a reminder of a time when editorial independence — publishing from and for oneself — was thought of as a native function of the personal computer, not a marginal or technical option reserved for specialists.
Is the Web still as open and decentralized as it was at the start?
Less than it once was. Originally conceived as a decentralized space where anyone could publish their own site, the Web has, since the 2010s, largely recentered around a handful of major platforms (social networks, search engines, marketplaces) that concentrate most of its traffic and attention. This wave of centralization has, in turn, fed initiatives deliberately attached to the Web's original spirit — the so-called IndieWeb movement, which promotes personal sites, independent of platforms, where everyone republishes and controls their own content.
Why is this site designed as an independent space?
Because work carried out over thirty years — research, creations, scientific and artistic collaborations — deserves a space that depends neither on a platform's lifespan nor on its ever-changing visibility rules. This site is conceived as a living archive and a presentation space of its own, whose form, content and longevity remain entirely under its author's control.
This independent site is the counterpart of an independent "arts-sciences" research practice that nonetheless takes full part in institutional research — CNRS, Ircam, Inserm, universities — bringing to it the freedom to move from one project to another, from one discipline to another.