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Description:

This project was a special composition for a place, or rather the sound composition of a particular place, in the sense that it is the place that physically composes the piece. The place was the Ariana Museum, Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass, in Geneva. The composition was that of the place and its objects. It revealed the space of the building, its geometries, its volumes, it was sensitive to the objects that were placed there because they would influence the listening as much as the walls of the rooms. An intuitive game was created on the border between research and creation: research because it implemented scientific acoustic and electronic physical principles, not new but tangible, pedagogical and verifiable; creation because it played with these principles with a freedom and an organic spontaneity that could also bring it closer to a form of instrumental improvisation. The composition diverted these principles in order to reveal the contours of large pieces and objects, so that we discovered and guessed them with our eyes and ears, to amuse ourselves and be surprised, to astonish the listeners, or to surprise an artificial head in the night. This piece, or I should say this set of short pieces, was infinitely renewable depending on the arrangement of the elements that made it up, e.g., sounds, transmitters and receivers, because it was recorded in binaural 3D sound with an artificial head along several video cameras that testified to the spatial projection of sound. This set of music disturbed the vision of listening, or perhaps the listening of vision. 

Of course, there are many historical references to which one thinks, the most famous being Edgard Varèse's electronic poem in the architecture of Le Corbusier and Xenakis, which also gave its reading of space as an acoustic case where sounds were projected. The implementation and the principles in this set of short electronic geometric pieces was however quite different. Indeed, the elements that make up these pieces, or I should probably say the machine-musicians that interpret the electronic work, are robot arms that each carried a particular ultra-directional loudspeaker, which could almost be described as a sound laser. This loudspeaker was based on an emission of ultra sounds (around 40Khz) modulated by a sound signal whose frequencies were audible. It is well known that ultra sounds, which we cannot perceive with our ears, propagate in a rectilinear way like sound rays because of their very small wavelength, they then bounce off the walls like billiard balls. The pieces were compositions of both the sounds emitted by the ultra-sound loudspeakers and the dynamic movements of the robot arms, which, by describing gestures, oriented the loudspeakers and strongly modified the directivity of the sound rays they send out. A spatial reading of the architecture jumped out at us, if I may say so, depending on the position of the listener in space. Thus the pieces were not only perceived differently according to the position of the robots in the room(s), but they were also received differently according to the position of the people listening. This variability was strongly felt because the sound emission was hyper-cardioid, if I can make the analogy with the directivity of a microphone. The audience was literally transformed into listeners - in French a listener is the same word as a headphone - which objectifies each person by relating their position to the different points of sound emission. The artificial head was another listener which recorded in binaural what it heard. 

Ultra sound speakers are already available commercially, they are quite expensive (several hundred dollars) and it is possible to build them for much less. Conversely, it is a little more difficult - but not impossible - to build robotic arms, but they are available at fairly reasonable prices. The construction of directional loudspeakers is of great interest for teaching, it uses practical knowledge of analog electronics for frequency modulation, which is easy and that students are familiar with as they learn it in electronic music courses within environments like Max Msp. I also proposed to four student composers to write a short piece of music for this installation devices. Note that the robot arms were wifi-connected, controlled by an Arduino and Raspberry Pi module and therefore in sync. It was also possible to write a fully interactive piece with this physically-spatialized, electronic instrument.