Arshia Cont is a researcher and developer at Ircam, with a focus on artificial intelligence with applications in computer music composition and performance. He is the leader of the score following project where its recent development Antescofo has enjoyed collaborations with various composers such as Pierre Boulez, Philippe Manoury, and Marco Stroppa; and numerous artists and venues in Europe, US and Asia. His research has been featured in various international symposiums and scientific journals and has received the SPECIF/Gilles Kahn Prize in 2009 for best PhD, sponsored by the French Academy of Science. In addition to his research role, Cont is the leader of musical research and in charge of coordinating scientific and musical research at Ircam where he founded the Musical Research Residency program.

Since 2007, Cont has been collaborating with composers as a computer-music designer where he did the electronic realizations of pieces such as … Of silence (Marco Stroppa) and Speakings (Jonathan Harvey). He appears frequently as a performer of live electronic pieces with various ensembles and artists notably for works by Pierre Boulez.

A native of Tehran, Arshia Cont obtained dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Virginia Tech, before finishing his joint PhD in computer music with University of California San Diego (UCSD) and University of Paris 6.

Realtime Music Composition and Performance: State-of-the-art and Future Challenges
The act of music performance is a "realtime" process, whereas the act of composition is an out-of-time process by nature and involves authoring of time, processes and interactions in various forms of writing. In computer music, realtime systems have gained tremendous attentions in the past two decades. Meanwhile, the gap between the compositional and performative aspects of computer music is more than apparent today both in existing practices of music making and also software platforms with their respective user communities, not to mention the classical divide between "realtime" and "off-line" schools of electronic music.

In this talk, we attempt to showcase the evolution of computer music systems with regards to their use for mixed electronic and instrumental music: A joint technical evolution on the software side and intellectual evolution on the performance/compositional side. We then show how the idea of "realtime" can actually bridge-in the gap between the practices of composition and performance, and how today in practice it can diminish the scholar division between so called "realtime" and "offline" schools of electronic music. Such views would shed light on new research paradigms that attempts to bring together the two worlds and pose challenging problems to both the research communities and artists. In the course of this talk, we will be showcasing the use of "score following" systems in the repertoire of mixed instrumental and electronic pieces in the past, and demonstrate their modern use through the Antescofo platform that attempts to answer both compositional and performative questions in computer music practices.