Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre (born 1948, in Lyon) turned electronic music into a mass phenomenon: “Oxygène” (1976) sold in the tens of millions, and his outdoor spectacles — Houston, Moscow, the pyramids of Giza — set repeated world attendance records. A student of musique-concrète founder Pierre Schaeffer, he has spent five decades treating new technology as the raw material of composition.

EōN: music that never repeats

In November 2019, unveiled at Web Summit in Lisbon, Jarre released EōN, an iOS app that generates an infinite, never-repeating stream of his music. Jarre composed, performed, and recorded a bank of original beats, melodies, and chords; an algorithm developed with the French audio studio BLEASS weaves them into endless new arrangements under his artistic direction, while Sony Computer Science Laboratories researcher Alexis André built its evolving generative visuals. Every listener hears a unique, unrepeatable piece.

Jarre’s embrace of generative systems comes from an unusual position: as longtime president of CISAC, the international confederation of authors’ societies, he simultaneously advocates for composers’ rights and remuneration in the digital era. He has repeatedly argued in interviews that AI will change the creative process the way synthesizers once did — opening territories rather than closing them — while insisting creators be paid when their work feeds the machines.

EōN extends a lineage running from Brian Eno’s generative ambient experiments into the AI era, and Jarre has continued exploring the frontier since — a fitting trajectory for an artist whose first instrument was a laboratory tape machine.