Pierre-Alain Jaffrennou was born in Besançon in 1939. In parallel to pursuing multiple degrees - from undergaduate to doctoral level studies - in pure and applied mathematics, geophysics, celestial mechanics, logic, and data analysis in Strasbourg, Besançon, and Lyon, Jaffrennou studied music in Besançon and in Lyon. He continued his study in music at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) in the electroacoustics course of Pierre Schaeffer.

From 1963 to 1967 he was the musical director of La Comédie de Besançon. After completing his musical studies, he joined the GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicale-ORTF-INA) as a researcher, where he worked from 1971 to 1977. During this time, he and Francis Regnier founded the a research laboratory for music and computing that focused on sound synthesis and processing.

In 1981, with James Giroudon, he founded GRAME in Lyon, a national center for musical creation, of which he remained the co-director until September 2009, as well as the Musiques en Scène Festival in 1992, which became a biennale in 2002. He also founded GRAME’s computer music research laboratory, which specialized in the study of computer systems for creating music, and served as its scientific director until 1985. A professor of performance arts and techniques at the Lyon School of Architecture, he has directed multiple research projects on architecture and computing. In 1989 he created ARIA, a laboratory for applied research in computing and architecture, under the aegis of the French Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, which is now a joint research center of the CNRS (France’s national center for scientific research). He served as ARIA’s scientific director until 1996.

His electronic and instrumental compositions are strongly inflected by his interest in the relationship between art and science, and in particular in the ways in which computers can contribute to the process of composing music. He also gives a great deal of attention in his work to the way music inhabits a space and is staged. In particular, since 1987, the year of the opening performance at the Festival International de Babylone, he has designed and created large-scale musicals, most often in outdoor venues, that feature many intrumental performers, lights, gigantic images, and special effects. In 2000, he created Animots, a permanent installation in Lyon’s Parc de Gerland, followed by another installation titled Stabat Mater Furiosa (2005) and a show titled Les voix du sacré (2006).

• Académie du Disque Français Prize for the group album Grame/Musiques numériques, 1989
• First prize in the national PUCE competition for the design of the SINFONIE sound spatialization system, 1984
• Faust d’or Prize for his show L’homme qui vole, 1991, Toulouse
• Faust de bronze Prize for his opera Jumelles (co-written with James Giroudon, 1993
• Faust d’argent Prize for his video film project À voix basse.
• Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres
• Ordre des palmes académiques