Pierre Barreau – Keynote Speaker

Pierre Barreau is the co-founder and CEO of AIVA, the Artificial Intelligence composing emotional soundtrack music and is considered one of the most innovative minds at the intersection of art and technology. As a computer scientist, award nominated film director and registered composer, Pierre leads the company towards its vision: empowering individuals by creating personalised soundtracks with AIVA.

AVIA specialises in classical and symphonic music composition and the algorithm became the world’s first virtual composer to be recognised by a music society (SACEM). AIVA learns to capture concepts of music theory and understand the art of music composition by reading through a large database of classical partitions written by famous composers. The technology can compose emotional soundtracks for films, video games, commercials and any type of entertainment content. AIVA’s own music is now on streaming websites such as Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal and has also been used by companies such as Vodafone and Nvidia. Barreau’s goal is to enable AI-generated music to create a new use cases of music and empower the next generation of composers and content creators.

Pierre Barreau was nominated for a Gold Panda Award in the “Best Director” category when he was 15 years old for a four-film documentary series, One Night in the Cosmos. The documentary-series shows footage from National Aeronautics and Space Administration colourised, edited, animated and combined with a musical score and state-of-the-art special effects. Barreau also created a TedTalk in 2018 and his video titled ‘How AI could compose a personalised soundtrack to your life’ has now reached over 1.2 million views.

Barreau graduated from University College London and studied Computer Science.