Interview with Paul Steenhuisen http://jeanpiche.com/Textes/Interview.

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Interview with Paul Steenhuisen

Electroacoustic composer Jean Piché (b Trois-Rivières, 1951) has been an active

contributor to the vital Canadian electroacoustic scene since the mid-seventies. In
1988, he joined the faculty of the University of Montreal, where he continues to teach
and do research in electroacoustic and computer music. One of his areas of activity
involves the combination of electroacoustic music with video images, of which his
piece Sieves is the most recent new work. As part of SOUNDplay, between
November 4 and 7, Piché will be in Toronto to present a talk (November 4) and to
premiere his new piece Sieves (Nov 5). While many other interesting artists will also
be involved in SOUNDplay, I took this opportunity to speak with Piché by phone at his
home in Montréal.

STEENHUISEN: Tell me about the soundworld of your piece Sieves. Is there a

primary sonic idea for the work?

PICHÉ: I’m using 1930s recordings from a Southern Baptist preacher, as well as
the communications tapes recorded during the 9/11 attacks on New York. But the
identity of the sound sources isn’t obvious in the work. I’m using the material as
dramatic texture. You get the dramatic content without actually understanding
what they are saying. There is urgency to the sound materials, which comes across
in the spectra of the voices. The other sound material is from my rather large bank of
sound processing that I’ve accumulated over the years – mostly granular textures
and stretching of acoustic materials.

STEENHUISEN: But the soundworld is only part of the story with this piece. Tell
me about the visual component. What are the primary visual materials in the work?

PICHÉ: I’m using HD video for the first time, and the precision of the image is quite
extraordinary. I’ve pulled my images from close-up shots of the ground - the earth,
forests and paths in the countryside - so what you see are the intricate details of the
soil as I walk with the camera pointing down. I compose with the images the same
way I do with the sound material, in the sense that I will distort and process them
with varying degrees of recognizability. The complexity of the image is associated
with the complexity of the sound. By putting them together in the ways I do, it’s
really a new paradigm for composition, in that I compose the image and the sound
together.

STEENHUISEN: Is the ambiguity of a recognizable form important?

PICHÉ: It is. The more I do of this, the more I realize how important it is. The
reason this new form works is because meaning is extracted from these connections
between the sonic and the visual. I’m not exactly sure what the meaning is yet, but
I think the aesthetic experience comes from recognizing that there are conjunctions.
They do not work based on narrative, but because of how time drives perception. It
comes down to what Michel Chion called synchrèse – a theoretical construct of
synchronization where you unequivocally know that the sound you have just heard is
produced by the object you are seeing. The idea is to lead to those points of
synchrèse in the work in the same way a chord progression leads to a resolution on a
tonal centre.

STEENHUISEN: How do the sound and the visuals interact in your piece?

PICHÉ: In this piece it’s a little more complex, because the synchrèses that I am
working with are a lot looser. As a simple example, if you have a beat structure in the
music you can cut the images to the upbeat or the downbeat. It’s an element of
grammar that you can go further and further with by saying that a high-pitched
slow-moving sound will visually translate into a form of a straight line that flows slowly
across the screen. But to be interesting, the metaphor has to go a lot further. It’s
very hard to describe the mechanisms that lead to synchrèse points that go beyond
this direct anchoring. We don’t have a grammar to describe it, so the problem of
1 of 1 electroacoustics is transported to the visual. Synchronization points are an obvious 2/7/05 2:44 AM
way of having the parts interact. Where something in the sound also happens at