Reflets / Vitesse

This music was composed in 1995 for the one hundred anniversary of cinema on the silent film Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse realised by Henry Chomette in France in 1925. The music was composed in hexaphonic format and most of the sound materials where generated by a real-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 René Clair, Henry Chomette made some experimental movies. This one is made out of retrieved fragments of pictures celebrating Paris as a town in perpetual movement. 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 rhythmical and hexaphonic spatial sound textures surround the audience, creating spinning movements as well as a sort of musical travelling. Passing through tunnels and under bridges becomes almost a physical experience...

Reflets/Vitesse was commissioned by the Société Philharmonique de Bruxelles and by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique for a concert celebrating the one hundred anniversary of Cinema at the Luna Theater in Brussels on the 18th of November 1995. It was composed in both ARTeM studio and Studio Métamorphose d'Orphée with granular synthesis sounds made at the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons.

Technical notes :
A dedicated hardware was developed in order to synchronise the 35 mm silent film, restored by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, with an ADAT tape playing the music. A video is available in one of the following formats: VHS, U-Matic Low Band or Betacam SP with either stereo music or Linear Time Code on the sound track. LTC can be used to synchronize an Alesis ADAT or a ProTools system.

The best video solution is currently to use a multitrack QuickTime video, with the following tracks assignment:
1 - 2 -> L-R Front speakers
3 - 4 -> L-R Lateral speakers
5 - 6 -> L-R Rear speakers