Brief summary of the doctoral project

The purpose of this PHD project it to develop a new research approach regarding extended and diversified musical «composable spaces» and two connected problematics to it : multi-scale sounds and multidimensional sound diffusion settings.

Different processes of hybridization of my musical practice began with the systematic use of complex sound objects made of various components that could encapsulate distinct attributes within them. These were first categorized according to perceptual criteria that we could summarize as belonging to noise, harmonic/inharmonic sound or referenced, « auratic » sound. This approach has gradually led me to redefine the « composable space » as a playground of object interactions and operations that are constructed on various superimposed planes in a multi-local approach. The explicit differences between the sonorities convoked within a work also implied a heterogeneous and multiple approach to its organization and composition, as well as the search for "transversal" operations that could be created by the relations between very diverse dimensions, scales and temporalities.

Within my pieces composed between 2011 and 2016 coexist noise (instrumental, mechanical or electrical) and "referenced" sound (historicized or taking into account the specific aura to each artistic practice and its era) ; electronic synthesis and samplers; hijacked objects and instruments; image, body movement and text; etc. To this diversity of content corresponded a multiplicity of ways of proceeding.

Without being able to specify a date or delimit a particular moment, but by identifying the symptoms already at that time, it naturally arose in me the need to match the multiple contents of musical materials, a multiplicity of containers. Fully aware of this necessity already around 2014 or 2015, it is from 2016 onwards that the widening of the multiplicity of musical materials to a multiplicity of settings, instruments and devices will crystallize in my musical production.

In parallel, various projects developed in collaboration with other artists (visual artists, choreographers, writers, mulimedia artists) have been a source of inspiration to conceive various strategies for extending tools used in musical composition and redefining the performer's body, musical instruments, gesture and space as objects of a given composable space.

These experiences allowed me to start thinking about ways of interacting or overlapping with other art forms; and on specific ways of making decisions in a trans-media creative context involving several actors. Since then, a flexible approach has become essential in the form of a dynamic system with multiple inputs that attempts to go beyond the methodology symbolized by the figure of the black box (borrowed from the first cybernetics) made up of inputs and outputs and constituting a linear work system.

The starting point to this research work was to identify specific questions of the targeted research field :

-What artistic methodology can be create in order to produce new knowledge regarding heterogeneous and multiple composable spaces?

-How can trans-medial artistic activity experience be use in in the production process of creating new tools for artistic research?