Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional Pierre Cochereau 2023

Concert evening at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional Pierre Cochereau

Projection of 4 videomusic works

Novembre 23 2023, at 6:30 p.m.

The conservatory joins the OVNi festival to present 4 videomusic works in its auditorium, 4 different approaches to the music/image relationship with international musical artists: Tesseract by Joao Pedro Oliveira (Portugal), Transmissions II by Ake Parmerud (Sweden), Hathor’s Mirror by Julie Mansion Vaquié (UCA), Francis Dhomont, music (France) and Iñes Wickman, video (Colombia). These works will be spatialized in 48 tracks, in real time, by students in the electroacoustic music class.

Usually, this large orchestra of loudspeakers is used to project acousmatic music. This is music in which the temporality of the sounds is entirely inscribed on a support, as the image is for cinema. The term acousmatic indicates that this is « pure » music, where there is nothing to see: no instrumentalist, no image. The performer’s main task is to deploy the movement of sound in the concert hall, and to manage timbre and volume like a conductor. In cinemas, audiovisual works also play with sounds that are mobile in space. Here, on the other hand, the sound is entirely fixed on a standardized support and totally at the service of the dramaturgy. With videomusic, the field of electroacoustic music offers a particular kind of audiovisual spectacle, in which the composer is generally both visual and sound director. Unlike cinema, the latter are intended to be spatialized on large devices, organized specifically for the acoustic projection space, with a performer in real time, as in acousmatic music.

This show offers four varied relationships of the music/image relationship in this setting, conceived by four creators. The fifth continues our collaboration with the international acousmatic composition competition Klang!

DERIVE (2010)

sound design, Natalia Ardis

This Drift is that of the blind exploitation of our devastated earth, suffocated under our waste in a spiral labyrinth. And yet… life goes on.
Creation Grant, Canada Council for the Arts.

L’AILLEURS TOUJOURS (2014)

_^by Francis Dhomont and Inés Wickmann

_{^{sound design, Dimitra Kamari}}

These images evoke wandering, a never-ending migration in a space where limits fade, where boundaries are vague; a place that never seems attainable and dilutes in shadow the footsteps of the multiplied traveler.

Time undecided, the goal uncertain.

FLUX OF KLANGFARBEN (2022) second prize in the international Klang! 202

_^by Yu-Chung Tseng

^{_{sound design, Noémie Halter}}

The main sound sources for Flux of Klangfarben are a few fragments of sampled Chinese musical instruments: Pipa, Zheng and Sheng. These sound clips were then manipulated using a technique similar to « development by variations », as used by Brahms and others. The aim was to elaborate all the possibilities for transforming the material, and beyond that, to abstract or « whiten » their identity in order to obtain the desired sound gestures, and in particular, the « timbre melody » (Klangfarben) of the work. The processed sounds were then « organized » (to use E.Varèse’s word) or « digitally micro-mounted » (to use H.Vaggione’s word) to create multiple artistic interests throughout the composition, and particularly an expressiveness of fluctuating timbre lines as they evolved over time. By analogy with G.Ligeti’s concept of « micropolyphony », the individual timbre melody line in Flux of Klangfarben also contributes to the synthesis of the composition’s entire timbral spectrum; this individual line remains hidden at the microscopic level, sometimes diving into the underwater world, sometimes rising to the surface to interact with other timbre melodies; as a result, a flux, a fluctuation of timbre is created and heard throughout the work. Flux of Klangfarben was realized at the Sound Lab of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) in Taiwan.

TESSERACT (2017)

_^by João Pedro Oliveira

_{^{sound design, Heja Can Deniz}}

A tesseract, also defined as a hypercube, is the equivalent of a four-dimensional cube. This video creates the possibility of a journey through the six faces of a cube, and how they can be transformed and projected into a tesseract, using a variety of processes: translation, rotation, fragmentation, explosion and implosion, and so on.

HATHOR’S MIRROR (2019)

_^by Julie Mansion-Vaquié

_{^{sound design, Elise Heinisch}}

An Egyptian goddess associated with dance and artistic creation, Hathor has a darker double face. Hathor’s Mirror is a free interpretation of this duality, present in all of us.

TRANSMISSIONS II (2015)

_^by Åke Parmerud

^{_{sound design, Louis Ferrari}}

Suite from Transmissions, for choir, processing and video, composed in 2012 for the KorVest choir (Bergen, Norway), in which the voices created and modified the video content. In Transmissions II, I further refined the various techniques of sound visualization through several types of oscilloscope. I apply to these simple reinterpretations a series of video treatments to produce more complex relationships between image and music.

The music in Transmissions II consists mainly of electronic signals and noises, resulting in a rather raw piece reminiscent of an earlier work of mine entitled… Raw. In addition, I’ve reused some of the micro-sonic sound material that appears in Grooves. These elements share noisy similarities; the soundscape of Transmissions II gives them a new identity.

This piece, too, is part of a stylistic axis in which I seek to break down the aesthetic barriers between electroacoustic on the one hand, and electronica and noise on the other.

Transmissions II was commissioned by Sweden’s national radio station, Sveriges Radio.

For further information on the works and artists, click here and here.