Meeting with composer and sound artist Elsa Biston

During this meeting hosted by philosopher Véronique Verdier, Elsa Biston will discuss her background and present her work Laisser le geste porter l'écoute (Let the gesture carry the listening): a sound installation in the form of a game, which invites you to listen to a simple dead leaf. To be discovered in the media library spaces.

By turning the crank of a brace - a manual drill, each visitor acts on the light rebound of the leaf against a vibrating cymbal. The slightest movement then transforms the rhythm and color of the sounds produced.

Amplified and broadcast through various objects placed around the participant, these sounds compose a constantly evolving soundscape.

The resulting sound is never completely controlled by the visitor: it is built at the meeting point of their gesture, the properties of the leaf and the cymbal, and a partition-program that guides the resonance of this sound in the different objects of the installation. Each listening experience thus becomes unique, shaped as much by the action as by what escapes it.

It is an invitation through play to slow down, to pay attention to the minute and to the rich sound of ordinary things.

Learn more
https://www.elsabiston.com/

Meeting Saturday, November 14 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Adult audience - Free admission

Sound installation visible (and audible) from November 14 to November 19

About the artist

Elsa Biston (1978) is a composer and sound artist. She has developed her device of vibrating objects, a set of objects and instruments set in vibration by transducers, for which she created the performative installation Prendre corps; a solo, Slow times low freqs, and the installation Aussi fragile que possible created at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024.
Her electroacoustic pieces (Il n’y a pas d’autre côté, Muance, Brume) have been broadcast by the Présences festival (Radio France), Futura, Elektra Music, Scrime, etc.
She has recently composed for the Zafraan ensemble (Berlin), Line upon Line, a percussion trio in Austin, Texas; for HANATSUMiroir (Strasbourg) and a vibrating object device, she created the piece Attentifs ensemble, a collective listening experience, at the Pop in April 2023.
She is also an artistic director for classical and contemporary music recordings for Radio France. Questions surrounding the medium and the meanings induced by mediatization are at the heart of her approach.
Her music invites a form of subtle attention to sound phenomena and the relationships that are woven during an event. She proposes complex materials within which the spectators create their own path, and can become aware of their own attention.
For some time now, her work has willingly focused on “worthless” objects and materials, scraps, sounds and objects that one might, a priori, say are uninteresting. She seeks in these materials the index of a presence, a desire, an intentionality; to make do with the hazards and what escapes the will.