The following is an English translation of a paper I co-wrote with Manuel Poletti and Tom Mays, presented at the 9th Journées d'Informatique Musicale, Marseille, 29–31 May 2002. It was one of the first attempts — from the inside — to sketch out what a musical assistant actually does, why the role exists, and where it might be going. More than twenty years later, most of the questions it raises remain open.
— C.F.
Manuel Poletti, Tom Mays, Carl Faia Composers and musical assistants
Introduction
For several years now, a specific activity has been taking shape, linked to musical creation using technology. As the world of computer music is in constant evolution, the need is growing for institutions to have qualified people capable of mastering these new technologies and ensuring their implementation in creation, while meeting production deadlines. We are convinced that enough elements are now in place to attempt to formalise the emergence of a new profession, based on the model of the musical assistant. We will address here the questions concerning the different axes of work of the musical assistant: although their activity remains centred around the technological aspect of musical creation, each assistant brings to each project their own responses and specific knowledge, and their aesthetic or artistic choices are regularly called upon. The definition and designation of this evolving profession will be examined, in order to better separate the different roles that coexist in the composer/assistant relationship. Finally, a joint project to create an information, research, training and musical production support unit — which may be of interest to the contemporary technological musical community — will be presented.
The Musical Assistant: A Definition
IRCAM has for several years been training and employing, in its production and pedagogy departments, a team of around twelve people called "musical assistants", who do not conform to any particular standard profile. A certain experience of the demands of musical production is required of them and, moreover, a capacity for adaptation necessary for working as a pair on a project.
Their tasks consist principally of:
- in the field of pedagogy: training composers on the course in the software tools developed at IRCAM, accompanying them during the elaboration of their piece, and running various workshops on computer music;
- in the field of production: assisting composers in their creative work, ensuring the performance of repertoire works and the longevity of these works through the evolution of hardware and software platforms;
- in both fields: developing computer tools specific to the production needs of pieces and the demands of composers.
In this article, we will speak principally of assistants affiliated with the production domain.
Although it is not the only centre to offer musical assistant services, IRCAM, through the nature of its musical production, has over the years come to structure the systematic reception of composers, notably by placing at their disposal, in addition to an equipped studio, a person capable of:
- mediating between them and the various departments involved in their project (research, valorisation, etc.);
- helping them to successfully plan the project through discussion, and the proposal and development or adaptation of specific tools or ideas;
- relieving them of the majority of technical difficulties encountered during the different stages of the project;
- participating in the creative process of the work.
The production department recruits for this purpose people who are, for the most part, musicians and/or researchers and often composers themselves, technically competent, and more importantly ready to experiment and capable of adapting and managing their skills in service of the composer and their project.
If they were initially engaged per project and according to demand, the musical assistants now form at IRCAM an indispensable link between the composer and the departments of production, research and pedagogy.
Why is a Musical Assistant Necessary?
To remain at the forefront both technically and artistically, an institute for research and creation in music/technology must create its own tools and train its own specialists. The prototype of the musical assistant was born from the need to find a generalist capable of directing artistic projects coupled with cutting-edge technology: it is engineers, researchers, and composers who are chosen for or who choose this new function.
Through experience in creation and research, the profile of people capable of directing the new system gradually defines itself — researchers having to research, composers to compose. The principal constraint of the institution in determining this profile lies in the nature of its objectives, which are to combine research and development with musical creation.
The person in question cannot be merely an enlightened practitioner; they must also collaborate with the composer, and thereby be able to integrate the latter's musical ideas and processes into their work.
They are first and foremost defined by their mastery of their instrument — here, the machine — and it is on this first criterion that their candidacy will be considered; but their own musical background — and by extension their own sensibility — is equally primordial: they will be asked not only for experience as a computer scientist, researcher, sound engineer and programmer, but also for a musically trained ear, ideally through a personal artistic practice, in order to better integrate and master the various technical and artistic stakes linked to other composers' creations.
Only a relatively small number of composers and creators today integrate computer music and research in an expert way into their work. The involvement in a technological project of a composer who does not have this experience becomes possible with the help of a musical assistant.
How to Define Their Role and Their Work?
The role of the musical assistant, in its original definition, is to ensure the link between research and creation in relation to composers. The assistant ensures the smooth running of each production to bring it to completion — generally, performance in concert.
Coordination is paramount: it is common, within the same production, to collaborate with researchers and programmers around a new technique from the analysis/synthesis team, and thereby to participate in the development of the ergonomics of the software used to carry out these transformations. It is also essential to properly organise the recordings intended for various analyses with the sound engineer and musicians.
When a project involves the development of a signal capture prototype by an engineer, a large number of experiments must be conducted together, both regarding the effectiveness of the instrument itself and its integration into the aesthetic of the project. The time devoted to communication within a large institution is therefore not negligible: there is never time to waste in a production.
During the development of the logistical and experimental aspects of the project, the assistant must also maintain continuous dialogue with the composer and keep a certain balance with regard to the creative stakes — which sometimes requires on the assistant's part considerable moral and psychological support.
Setting aside the cold and unconsidered passion of the assistant for the machine and experimentation in general, the work dedicated to the composer and their project nevertheless draws on something in the order of vocation — a true calling, without which any good collaboration of this type is impossible.
The task, one can see, is multiple and delicate.
Technical / Artistic
Just as the composer can ask the assistant about a specific technique, they can request an opinion on a particular passage of their score, or on how to incorporate a certain technology in a musical context. The freedom to respond to aesthetic questions is left to the assistant's discretion. In the currently generally accepted perception, the assistant is considered a technician, which implies a dividing line between technology and creation. But what to say of this division when the assistant's advice is as important for the creation as for the technical work?
Frustrations can arise when production demands force the assistant to engage on several levels of their expertise without the corresponding recognition of their work. It is up to each assistant to manage their commitment.
The fact is that the public at large is unaware of the musical assistant's involvement in contemporary musical creation, although certain communication efforts have been made in recent years.
But it is equally complicated to explain to music lovers why the composer cannot assume all responsibilities in this type of creation, as it is to clarify the exact extent of the assistant's involvement — which varies from creation to creation.
Can one compose in pairs or in groups? The question of multiple-authored composition is not really at issue here. Yet examples of collaboration are numerous and varied in the world of creation. In music, one often calls upon orchestrators, arrangers and harmonists to compensate for limitations of technique or time. The composer is also dependent on the performer of their music. A parallel can be drawn between the instrumental performer and the musical assistant, except that the latter is still not recognised by the public or by professionals.
The current evolution of this particular role of coordinator/technician/advisor leads us to rethink the overly restrictive definition of "assistant" and to prefer that of "musical producer" — at least when the project does not call for specific research involving scientific teams (the development and research component, if it takes place, being conducted directly by the assistant).
In the world of popular music, the producer is considered an artist who possesses the talent to invent and develop a particular sound or style. They are respected and sought out by the musical community for their work with instruments, software programming, or synthesisers. They are capable of collaborating with other artists and of creating musical works with them. This is a recognised mode of working, and one we intend to propose for our own field.
The Freelance Musical Assistant
Trained at IRCAM but subsequently working freelance, certain assistants are involved in numerous productions and creations, often far from the studios and the "aesthetic" of the institute. Although legally external to the institute, they remain parties to the various internal discussions. Production benefits from this: it has both a permanent team and the flexibility to manage demand and budget by calling on qualified contributors rich in experience acquired outside.
The freelancers — or contributors — are called upon to collaborate with other institutes or with individuals and to participate in projects whose diversity is growing: music, video, live performance, installations, research, interactivity, pedagogy. IRCAM remains, through its history and constant involvement, at the crossroads of contemporary creation.
The various centres of musical and multimedia production that call upon the contributor benefit from their experience and can receive updated advice during experimentation or use of any given technological product. The follow-up of contributions within the same institute can extend to a regular collaboration spread over different seasons, favouring the integration of production concepts oriented towards technologies.
Towards a New Profession
Today, the "assistant/producer" working freelance benefits from a particular qualification arising from applied research and an autonomy served by computing, and for these reasons is the object of a growing demand from various institutes — studios of musical creation, CNRS, theatres, schools of art, and others.
Faced with the multiplicity of demand, the assistant/producer is led to develop their own techniques and tools, their own network, and gradually becomes, both outside and inside institutions, a new link between the technological world and the cultural world.
More than an activity, it is an emerging profession that is taking shape and which, as such, also encounters difficulties of implementation and operation: how to structure this new profession?
At IRCAM, all peripheral questions around the work between the assistant and the composer are handled by an administration experienced in the field: travel, hotels, concert logistics, coordination of partners, communication.
Multimedia creation is relatively recent. As a result, the call for specialised intervention in a project has no truly defined basis, either financially or relationally. No status as an intermittent worker has yet been adapted to this role. Some structures requesting the intervention are authorised to remunerate intermittent performing artists; others are not.
To date, the general success encountered by this type of collaboration between cultural institutions and freelance computer music specialists suggests that its mode of operation could be improved and expanded to better meet demand. As there is still very little qualified personnel on the market, the schedules of musical assistants are very full and prevent good organisation of missions. How to train new musical assistants? Can we imagine the establishment of specific training for this profession? How to formalise a professional curriculum? And within institutes such as IRCAM, could the creation of such a curriculum fill the gap between supply and demand?
By Way of Conclusion: A Project in Progress
As a first step, the improvement of the assistant/producer service could consist of establishing a defined and internet-accessible information unit, capable of facilitating relations between research/creation institutes, composers and multimedia creators on one hand, and a team of qualified potential contributors in research and creation on the other, able to offer multiple services adapted to each specific project.
The nature of these services will evolve between: assistance with musical production in concert, in studio or in live performance; computer assistance at concerts drawing on a mixed acoustic/electroacoustic repertoire; software developments for specialist or broader audiences; the development of specific computer systems within multimedia installations; pedagogical intervention on themes linked to computer music and multimedia; and assistance with the training of musical assistants within institutions themselves.
Those involved will in this first stage be constituted solely as a free network — institutes, studios, individuals — centralised by the setting up of a website by the team of contributing assistants/producers.
The open nature of an activity of service, information and animation, centred on computer music and its applications, will allow for the testing of the relevance of a more structured project in the future.
Originally published in French as "Assistant musical ou producteur? Esquisse d'un nouveau métier", Journées d'Informatique Musicale, 9e édition, Marseille, 29–31 mai 2002, pp. 241–246. English translation prepared with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), 2025.