Pierre Barbaud
Pierre Barbaud (1911–1990) invented algorithmic music, and did it on borrowed company iron. Born in Saint-Eugène, Algeria — his father Alexandre was an astronomer at the Algiers observatory — he turned from conventional composition to what he called automatic composition in 1958, becoming the first person in France and the second in the world, after Lejaren Hiller, to use a computer systematically to compose. He named that first set of ten programs Algol. The machines came from industry rather than the academy: Bull supported the early experiments of the Groupe de Musique Algorithmique de Paris, and from 1959 to 1975 Barbaud worked for Honeywell Bull in Paris, where the large calculators could run the long computations his pieces needed. Alongside this he wrote film music through the 1950s, including Alain Resnais's Le Chant du Styrène (1958) and Chris Marker's Un Dimanche à Pékin (1957) and Lettre de Sibérie (1958). He taught musical informatics at the Paris Conservatoire in 1977–78 and died in Nice in 1990. He is also the reason Vera Molnár got her hands on a computer. It was Barbaud, a friend, who opened the door to the university computing centre at Orsay in 1968, where she worked unofficially — clandestinely, as she put it — on evenings and weekends. Her machine imaginaire became a real machine because a composer knew where the machines were.
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