Ircam tools overview for creative sound design and generative music production by Guillaume Piccarreta and Paola Palumbo

An introduction to the Ircam Forum community and technical overview of the tools for creative sound design and generative music, such as concatenative synthesis, audio mosaicing and neural audio synthesis using machine learning.

The technologies developed at Ircam meet a wide range of uses for audio production, teaching and research. In this presentation, Paola Palumbo will introduce the Ircam Forum community gathering musicians, sound designers, sound engineers, researchers, professors and students. Guillaume Piccarreta will give an overview of the Ircam Forum tools enabling creative sound design and generative music, highlighting SKataRT and RAVE more specifically.

SKataRT is a MaxforLive sound sketching plug-in that combines the concatenative synthesis techniques of CataRT with sound and gesture control.


RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder) is a state-of-the-art framework for real-time neural audio synthesis and timbre transfer. It leverages deep learning to enable artists to explore new sonic textures and create real-time audio transformations.

These tools open the doors to endless creative endeavors leveraging years of experimentation and development by Ircam researchers.