Text on text

Based on the writings and recordings of Julien Gracq, this piece pushes written and spoken text towards abstraction, encouraging the listener to question text as form over content.

The resulting digital palimpsest retains just enough of the original meaning to offer glimpses of the author’s thoughts and prose; while artificially reconstructing a commentary on meaning, perception and surrealism in literature and music.

Noise through to twos and sevens

This piece is the result of the mapping of an artificial neural network’s processing data onto sound and visuals. At its core, it’s an attempt at making art from AI with a non-generative approach, leaving all creative agency to the artist; at exploring structures inherent to the operation of neural networks; at commenting on the nature of these ubiquitous, yet notoriously unintelligible algorithms.

It does so by focusing on some of the network’s internal data streams during training, looking at their gradual movement from noise to order, and mapping this information onto sound and visual materials and processes derived from ‘glitch’ and drone traditions, that offer interesting aesthetic parallels to this evolution of the data.

Read more about the details of it → here

Reiterate something so many times that it changes

The direct visualisation of an artificial neural network trained on the classification of non-linearly separable data, a foundational problem of machine learning, this piece attempts to ‘open the black box’ of AI networks.

The limits of this approach are the high degree of abstraction and complete unintelligibility of the many simultaneous streams of numerical data that flow continuously through even a very simple neural network.

The loop-based music offers a semantic and poetic parallel to the iterative nature of these processes.

Cut through and from

Filtering pink noise to a chord (increasing the Q-value of tens of bandpass filters), while having an increasingly high amplitude sine wave exert a pull on visual particles.

Audio and visual representations of noise to pitch transitions, of randomness to order.

Morph out into itself
I. Continuous
II. Cyclical
III. Mitotic

This three-movement work explores the patterns that result from reaction diffusion systems (mathematical models that describe various chemical and biological phenomena) in audiovisual representations.

A simulation of one of these systems is run with different starting parameters in each movement. The resulting visual characteristics of each run serves as the basis for the arrangement and timbral transformations of layered loops of string materials.

Just as slightly different initial conditions lead to unique but unmistakably connected visual outcomes, the three movements are composed of similar yet individual combinations of sound materials, all taken from the same set of violin and cello recordings.

Self-similarity, aesthetic restraint and repetition are crucial to this piece in both visual and sound domains.

Letter upon letter of meaninglessness

What if telegraphic morse code was transmitted as chopped-up organ notes instead of analog sine waves?

What if the operator was an infinite monkey, who would’ve ditched its typewriter for a telegraph key?

What if another monkey was playing with the contents of a digital Snellen chart?

From there, how do you make sense of seemingly meaningless information?

And is anything really senseless if it’s encoded using a painstakingly conceived standardised system?

Spin, split, spread, splatter (in eighths)

An 8-channel piece, in which an artificial neural network learns (at first unsuccessfully) to arrange a set of points in eight evenly spaced gaussian distributions, resulting in the sound being panned more or less evenly between eight speakers.

A spatial audio representation of machine learning for simple point distributions.

Viderunt omnes ;
Beata viscera ;
Sederunt principes

This series of electronic works uses recordings of vocal pieces by Pérotin and Léonin (12th and 13th century French composers from the Notre-Dame school) and sounds produced by a passive pick-up antenna (a copper solenoid soldered to an audio cable, turning electromagnetic interferences into sound signals). The pieces focus on the contrast and symbiosis between these very organic and purely synthetic sounds.

The series is an exploration of framing, looking at how the re-contextualisation of nearly identical materials can lead to radically different results:

Beata viscera explores the sculpting of a sound masse as an organic process, leading to a slowly evolving timbral and textural landscape;

Viderunt omnes fixes all materials to a rhythmic grid, where gestures repeat at different intervals, forming a succession of discrete frames, all similar but always changing;

Sederunt principes explores growth, and again, framing (in an almost photographic sense, as changes in focal length and depth of field), by making use of distant choral recordings and high-proximity solo takes, and by superimposing very close synthetic interjections on more remote pitched and noise drones.

Somewhere between self-similar and repetitive

This piece is an exploration of repetition, layering, and decay. Each part is assigned a basic short phrase — each tightly restricted harmonically — repeated again and again with subtle timbral and dynamic changes. This structure invites the listener to notice minute movement within the shape of the resulting loop; to shift their focus between the parts of the orchestral whole; to eventually notice the decay and loss of integrity of the original material.

With the orchestra split into arbitrary sections of instruments, coming in and out to thicken and thin out the texture, the highly repetitive materials are also ever-changing. The electronics, made up of organ drones and similarly static harmonically to the orchestra, act to cement the discrete frames of the instrumental part into one cohesive stretch.

Perhaps more obviously than anything, this work looks at cross-media materiality, deriving visuals from the live sound of the ensemble and blurring the line between literal and representational paradigms. This cross-fertilisation between audio (acoustic and electronic) and visuals, introducing representations of one in the other, is central to my practice, through which I like the audience to realise the inherent materiality of the sounds presented to them.

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Mythe de l'artiste taciturne, insomniaque, dépendant à la caféine, attablé jusqu’à l’aube à un bureau mal éclairé et jonché des ébauches d'œuvres incomplètes, griffonnées dans la marge de quelques carnets aux feuilles jaunies, dans le désordre rassurant d’une chambre nimbée de fumées troubles

Written for the RNCM Brand New Orchestra, this piece explores movement within stasis; unstable intervallic relationships within an immutable harmonic block; dissonance between the constituent elements of consonance; perpetually moving parts in an immobile whole. It also delves into questions of individuality of acoustic lines within a sound masse, of noise foregrounding or drowning-out pitch, of the interests of non-narrative structures.

All materials are drawn from a single chord; lines move between its pitches, horizontally, changing the overall sound, vertically. In this aspect, it owes something to works like Justė Janulytė’s Sleeping patterns; Bryn Harrison’s Shifting light; or Gérard Grisey’s Partiels, that impose tight limitations on the music’s harmonic content to focus in on variations in timbre, texture, density, pace.

The electronics are similarly focused, consisting of pink noise being progressively filtered to the same chord as the orchestra, over the 8 minutes of the piece.

I think its title, somewhat acerbically ironic, partly acts as a commentary on other – often older – orchestral works, where harmonic tension and movement are inherently tied to the music’s structure and sense of narrative. Perhaps these are works that many are more familiar with, works that revolved around myths, grandiose ideals, and whose composers are often revered as brilliant, solitary, virtuosic creators, no lesser myths than the ones they would compose about. In any case that is something I had been thinking about when I was writing it.

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threaded | spinning | abrading | possibly breaking
Co-created with Sam Longbottom

This installation centres on the automated playing of string instruments tuned in just intonation. In it, a loop of fishing line is threaded through the strings, and drawn tight around pulleys secured to turntables. With the turntables switched on, the loop of fishing line rotates, bowing the strings. Unpredictable variations in sound arise with each new performance, despite the work’s automated nature.

It is an exploration of fragility; of subtle yet detailed organic shifts and variations in timbre, pitch, volume, texture; of the simultaneous harmonic complexity and aesthetic simplicity that emerge from tuning strings in just intonation. Variations in physical parameters (bowing speed, amount of rosin, string tension, etc.), in preparations, in materials, etc. allow for a wealth of intricate changes in the sounds produced, even within a well-defined sound world.

This work also has a strong visual identity, and questions the use and re-purposing of the sound-related objects it features (instruments, turntables, hard-bound music scores, etc.).

Music for gently pressurised air, organ pipes and colourful hard-bound music scores
Co-created with Sam Longbottom

This installation is a study of the automated playing of wind instruments. It uses organ pipes, tuned in a 7-limit tuning, forming a rich, consonant chord, whose pitches are gradually introduced, and from which particular intervallic relationships are foregrounded by changing the pressure of air brought to the pipes. It is an exploration of the beating patterns that emerge from pipes tuned in close proximity, of the simultaneous harmonic complexity and aesthetic simplicity of a chord built around justly intoned sevenths, of the subtle pitch and timbre variations obtainable by varying air pressure, closing or opening the pipes or isolating specific subsets of the entire chord.

Ce que le givre conserve d’une empreinte

A short piece exploring the glacial timbres of clainet multiphonic trills and viola harmonic trills; the perception of repetition; the foregrounding of jarring contrasts.

Written for a trio from the Riot ensemble.

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Coagulant

Made from recordings of Ce que le givre conserve d’une empreinte, this acousmatic work explores the electronic moulding of acoustic textures; the compartmentalisation of specific spectral configurations; and the stretching and chopping up of discrete sounds to make up continuous backdrop lines and rumbles.

De part en part de part et d’autre

This work is the realisation of a two year collaboration with Manon McCoy, looking at harp repertoire and techniques; thinking about how to collaboratively develop an idiosyncratic vocabulary for the instrument, and about how to use electronics to complement and expand its sound without denaturing it; and workshopping multiple drafts of the materials and piece throughout the compositional process.

Split in two parts, it explores the timbral richness of the harp’s tone through unconventional playing techniques, and its fragility through the use of carefully selected harmonics within a semi-modular structure. The electronics are the bridge between these two sections, as signal from the harp is processed in real-time, and elements of acoustic material from each part are used to expand the sound world of the other. Through this sole use of acoustic sounds, the electronic part explores the harp’s resonance to create a soundscape continually reshaped by the live signal.

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Tidal forms

Sonification/visualisation of tidal patterns from six locations on the Atlantic coast of France over a week.

Read more about the details of it → here

Tanguy Pocquet

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