[ISEA96] Artist Statement: Todor Todoroff — Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse

Artist Statement

This music was composed in 1995 for the one hundredth anniversary of cinema on the silent film “Jeux et de la vitesse” realised by Henry Chomette in France in 1925. It was commissioned by the Societe Philharmonique de Bruxelles and by the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, with an ADAT tapeplaying the music. The music was composed in hexaphonic format and most of the sound materials where generated by areal-time multichannel granular morphing algorithm developed at the Polytechnic Faculty in Mons, Belgium, and running on the IRCAM Sound Processing Workstation.

The older brother of Rene Clair, Henry Chomette made some experimental movies. This one is made out of retrieved fragments of pictures celebrating Paris as a town in perpetual movements. Most of the film is a long hypnotising run through Paris by train and by boat. The music accentuates the impression of speed and the constantly moving rhytmical and hexaphonic spatial sound textures surround the audience, creating spinning movements as well as a sort of music travelling. Passing through tunnels and under bridges becomes almost a physical experience…