Marc Chemillier was born in Martinique on March 11, 1960. Fascinated by his parents' jazz records,
he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in 1971 to study jazz piano with Jack Diéval and Pierre Cornevin,
played music with school friends such as Yves Chaudouët who later became an artist, and took part in
Hugues Panassié's workshops in Montauban in 1973 and 1974. He entered the École Normale Supérieure de
Fontenay-aux-Roses in mathematics in 1981, followed jazz lessons at the CIM (jazz school in Paris) and
played with various professional musicians (Nguyên Lê, Manu Galvin, Marc Thomas, Louis Winsberg,
Talib Kibwe aka T. K. Blue, Baaba Maal). After graduating from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris,
he enters the harmony-counterpoint classes.
After an internship at IRCAM where he met Gérard Assayag, he began a thesis in computer music, which he defended in 1989.
He then turned towards anthropology by working on the harp music of the Nzakara of the Central African Republic
and published in 1995 Music of the Former Bandia Courts as a CD with Éric de Dampierre (CNRS/Le Chant du monde).
He then worked in Madagascar on the music of the marovany zither associated with trance in the possession cult called tromba.
In 2000, his meeting with Bernard Lubat gave birth to the improvisation software OMax developed at IRCAM by the
OMax Brothers collective (Gérard Assayag, Marc Chemillier, Shlomo Dubnov, Georges Bloch). In 2007, he was elected
Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and published
Les Mathématiques naturelles by Odile Jacob. He continues his research on computer-assisted improvisation
with a new software version called Djazz created in the framework of a collaboration between
his laboratory CAMS (EHESS) and IRCAM, and develops different artistic projects around Djazz
in the fields of free improvisation, jazz, world music (Madagascar) and electronic music. In 2021, he published
with Bernard Lubat and Gérard Assayag the CD-book Artisticiel taken from several concerts involving co-creativity
between humans and machines.