Olivier Pasquet - Public Lecture (In English)

Synthetic times:

Scores for electronic music do not have the same necessity as those for music interpreted by instruments, whether traditional or not. There is no pragmatic necessity for such scores apart from being tangible and recognised objects of music.

In this genre, the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive scores is blurred, and the order of execution is often scrambled. This is particularly evident in generative music, where represented times are themselves representations. Determinism and correlations are apprehended, and read, from completely different perspectives and dimensions. Especially when there is no apparent musician at the time of performance or strong indeterminacy. This even has social consequences for how and where one listens to music. 

These circumstances create enough interesting uncertainties to inspire risky artistic explorations. We have witnessed many graphic scores, sonograms, and other concepts transferring from sound to graphics, and vice versa. We have also observed numerous interdisciplinary works, both artistic and scientific, dealing with the wide variety of interactions between different media. It has become somewhat uncommon to encounter scores and space being compositions themselves.

Olivier will present two divergent directions he has recently explored for a specific series of music pieces. Their aesthetics however share common ground with highly defined rhythmic structures and sometimes post-techno. 

The first one deals with composing solely in black and white, only with time, with no timbre, nor anything else. These generative pieces, where the form is synonymous with time, materialise as sound works, large-scale paper compositions, and 3D-printed acoustic traces within surreal architectural buildings. Their computational design utilises architectural machine-learning techniques and homemade tools for virtual room acoustics and spatialisation. The second direction is less structural and more emotionally driven. It leans towards theatricality and plays with the expectations, reflexes, and imaginations of listeners regarding composed abstract languages. The time reading such texts becomes auditory when artistically combined with a musical language. These works are reminiscent of historical music-theatre pieces where permutations of phonemes are used for meaning, musical means, and potentially political narratives. Several rewritten unconventional AI voice synthesis engines, along with historically recognisable voice techniques, are employed for this purpose. 

Both of these approaches represent ongoing artistic research that is ultimately guiding Olivier towards developing a personal synthetic style of generative composition and theatrical... game.