Retour à la raison

This music was composed in 1995 on the silent film Back to reason realised by Man Ray in France in 1923. 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. Some other sound materials were generated with the help of a program simulating the behaviour of a pendulum and triggering sounds according to its position and speed. Almost no effects were applied to the sounds to match the nature of the images evolving from grainy textures to a naked woman body, with many unexpected abrupt cuts. I wanted to transpose this constant use of apparently non-related pictures and to stress the impression of non-sense present all along this Dadaist movie.
Retour à la raison 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 ARTeM studio Studio with granular synthesis sounds made at the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons.

Technical note :
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