Sebastien Beaumont / Electron Zero
Sebastien Beaumont
/
ELECTRON ZERO
**Q *
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REVERBERATIONS
Since childhood, entering a place with strong reverberation has fascinated me. In France, often the first experience of reverberation, and one that can easily be repeated, is that of the volume of a church. It is on this one that I will focus, questioning not only reverberation but also its impact and the role it plays in my perception of the world.
As a child, I loved walking into a church during a service. Hearing the hum, feeling the fervor of the people responding with one voice to the sermon filled me with a certain joy. Yet, as soon as I got closer and was able to make sense of what I heard, the galvanizing poetry disappeared and gave way to language, to orientation, and deprived me of my freedom to interpret the sounds I heard. Joy gave way to disappointment. So I stepped back, played with the tipping point, and tried to find my place between the vague and the real.
Where we are:
This acoustic experience led me much later to a reflection that would prove essential and existential for me, it simply questions my "position" in the world around me as a geographical position of course but also political (in the sense of Polis) and spiritual. How much reality do I want and can I bear for life to be acceptable? To access this pleasure of living? How to find the point of balance between real and vague?
How much blur do we inject into reality in order to survive according to our unique psycho-affective and psychomotor conditions? Isn't this amount of blur that we are capable of injecting what we call "creativity"? Wouldn't this border between blur and reality be the place for a salutary artistic act?
To try to answer all these questions, we sought to invent a handy tool, offering the empirical possibilities of trial and error necessary to find the critical distance and test it. This is where virtuality comes into action. Through a configured VR headset, everyone finds their critical distance in a virtual environment reconstructing a volume provided with 4 sound sources symbolized by spherical shapes with a specific, adjustable reverberation. The experimenter can control what they want to hear or not, understand or not by moving within the volume. The closer they get to the source, the more audible and clear it will be. But the experience offers several phases. The experimenter first discovers the environment and can move towards the sources of their choice. Then, in a second step, a miniature of the room is offered to them so that they can act on the volume either by stretching walls, increasing the volume of the room, or rotating the volume. Once reconfigured, it can explore and re-experience.
The installation provides for two simultaneous experimenters who will each have their own personal environment but who will be able to meet and interact in certain areas of the movement space.
A phase without possible control is also planned where the experimenter will see his reference points and his distance/reverberation ratio disrupted, encouraging him to reposition himself in a new sound paradigm.
Abbey of Saint-Michel in Thiérache
The project is constantly evolving, and the events that mark its development contribute to its growth. It changes as encounters and opportunities arise.
Reverberations saw its first installation at the IEEE ( Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) international conference in Saint-Malo from March 7 to 12, 2025.
In May 2025, we will be in residence at the Saint-Michel Abbey in Thiérache to carry out a Scan of the site and calculate the impulse responses to create a sort of 3D and sound identity card of the place. Combining technological, artistic, but also heritage, territorial, and educational issues.
To be continued!
with:
Florent Berthaut , computer science researcher at the CRIStAL laboratory of IRCICA: programming, design, conception of the 3D model and interactive spaces.
Titouan Dumesnil : sound recording, sound expertise, control room.