"Ear me in..." opens and our perception is broadened by a multitude of sound-creatures, multicolored shadows struggling within the forest of our mind. Back in 2005 when Bernard Parmegiani came in the South of France because one of his major work was spatialized in a festival, I spent some time with him doing an interview for Radio Grenouille and enjoyed learning a lot from our discussions. Being a huge fan of his compositions, and especially of his magnificent "De Natura Sonorum", I decided to start working on an opus dealing with "Dynamic of the resonance and its incidences": a microphonic exploration of a single sound body made to resonate by means of different types of percussion. A friend percussionist allowed me to spend some time in his studio recording his various instruments and thus I was able to play with Timpani, Tubular Bells, Marimba, Wind Chimes, Castanets, Bass Drums, Gong, Gamelans, Balafon, and some other Hand Drums + my own amplified wood tablet. After a few days creating a soundbank which would serve as the basis for an album, I started processing, playing with frequencies, pitch, juxtaposing, toying up with tessitures, resonances, paying the utmost attention to details, ambitus and creating dynamics. Processing through Max-MSP patches or GRM Tools mostly relying on the transformation technique of Fourier's harmonic analysis and spectral resynthesis, splitting a soundwave into its component frequencies and phases, manipulating those and then mashing them all back together again. Those electroacoustic behaviors are obviously dealing with minutiae and extreme attention to sound, its interactions and incidences, but still work on sound events creating tension, drama, building up images, a story rather than an acousmatic sound-to-sound approach.

Philippe Petit