Sounds of france

For several decades, important research work has been undertaken to categorize, classify, recognize or synthesize music and voices.

The work on sound ambiences has, for the most part, been left aside because this sound material is more difficult to define, to model, to qualify. Ambiences take on an infinite number of forms, identities and structures.

The Sons du sud research project, which has now become Sons de France, consists of qualifying and describing cinematographic sound atmospheres. It seeks to understand the system of relevance of sound editors (the main users of these ambiances), to understand the uses of ambiances in films, to understand the different intentions of listening to the material, to identify classes of sounds in this context, and to grasp the modalities of selecting these sounds in databases.

This approach leads us to go beyond the structuralist approaches and the immanentist logics of purely semiological research. In order to qualify the sounds in a relevant way, we seek – beyond the elaboration of a thesaurus adapted to the cinematographic ambiences – to understand how meanings emerge in a course of action (enaction), in a situated framework and by an approach of phenomenological nature.

The Sons de France website, entirely developed thanks to funding from the SATT, is currently being finalized. Nearly 500 sounds will soon be indexed in the database.

This new development of the database allows us to continue our research on sound environments. A new axis of reflection, around the difficulties encountered by professionals in communicating an atmosphere or an intention of realization will be based on a corpus of ambiences from Sons de France. In addition, Sons de France will feed the experimentations on the sound atmospheres of the interdisciplinary structuring project “Atmospheres”.

This project is managed by R. Adjiman, Y Lubiato (SATT funding).

In addition, the SATIS department, which is attached to the PRISM laboratory, has just acquired a new building whose technical premises can accommodate PRISM researchers for the implementation of specific experiments involving recording or sound stages or mixing auditoriums, in connection with the Sons de France and “Atmosphères” project.

Funding

SATT Sud-Est

Members

PhD students

Related Laboratory Axes

Headed by

SInce 2018