outdoor spatialized audio fiction
Concept: Sébastien Roux, Olivier Vadrot
Set: Olivier Vadrot
Sound: Sébastien Roux
Text: Célia Houdart
Voice: Laurent Poitrenaux Coproduction: Entre Cours et Jardins Festival, Cesare — National Center of Musical Creation, Reims
Paysages rectangles is a radio piece, spatialized through an original speaker setup that allows pre-recorded sounds to blend with the surrounding soundscape. In order to emphasize sound perception, and the blend between environmental and recorded sounds, the listener, sitting in a canvas tent, cannot see the origin of the sounds. This recalls Pierre Schaefer’s Acousmatic Theory that refers to Pythagoras who used to teach his students behind a curtain so that they would not get distracted seeing him. There are five identical tents in which the listeners can sit and experience the piece. In each tent, there is a small speaker playing the narrator’s voice, as if he were sitting with the group of listeners. The soundscape is outside the tent. It mixes the location soundscape with the pre-recorded composition. The composition evolves slowly from a “realistic” soundscape to an abstract, mental, electronic soundscape.
During the piece, two performers move the speakers. For each of the five parts of the piece, there is a speaker diagram. At the beginning of the piece, the speakers are 150 feet away from the tents. During the most abstract part, they are very close to the tents.
