A part of the Fête de la Musique
Le Cercle du son (The Circle of Sound) is a performance created for the reopening of the Palais de la Découverte. Floy Krouchi has conceived a slow, resonant piece, akin to a contemporary alap (the alap is the opening and slowest section of a traditional Indian rāga). The piece invites the audience to hear space and time through the unfolding of low frequencies and the slow oscillations of the FKBass, a bass instrument enhanced with electronics. The musician will be accompanied by the circular visual of The Snail, a software program developed by researchers in the Sound Systems and Signals: Audio/Acoustics, Instruments team at IRCAM, which musically reveals the spectral and frequency analysis of the sound generated in real-time.
The audience is placed inside the sound, within the “circle of sound” and its harmonics, to grasp the microtonalities induced by the meend (the gradual glide from one note to another) and the use of subtle intervals, attentive to the unfolding of this electronic and contemporary rāga: pitch transpositions, spectral and poetic transformations, textures and sonic materials...
Floy Krouchi concept, composition, FKBass, and voice
Thomas Hélie, Robert Piéchaud, Ircam-STMS development and projection of The Snail
Benjamin Pagier sound design
Jean François Domingues lighting design
Le Cercle du son is the meeting point of cutting-edge scientific research and an equally rigorous artistic practice, open to other cultures and with real potential to engage a broad public curious about both science and the arts.
A Soluble dans l’Air, IRCAM–Centre Pompidou, Césaré CNCM–Reims, Hémisphère Son coproduction. With the support of the Institut Français, the Institut Français in India, Alliance Française of Pune and Mumbai.