PIERRE-LUC SENÉCAL AND PIERRE-LUC LECOURS
Our sincere congratulations to Pierre-Luc Lecours, a master’s student under the direction of Pierre Michaud, and Pierre-Luc Senécal, a master’s student under the direction of Robert Normandeau, who have been offered an artist’s residency at Sporobole, a contemporary art centre.
This 2-week residency at Sporobole’s creative studio is a unique opportunity to integrate the professional artistic milieu into a contemporary art centre. The residency offers the opportunity to compose a piece for 16 loudspeakers for broadcast in the “sound wall”, a permanent sound projection system in an urban environment located in the heart of the city of Sherbrooke.
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Pierre-Luc Senécal / music.box / Residence at Sporobole from January 14 to January 28 2019
Music piece composed for 16 speakers from a single instrument: the music box. Indeed, this object has an irreplaceable importance in my musical imagination. Audible in several films that have touched me deeply, this object symbolizes for me melancholy and fragility. Moreover, in popular culture, this instrument recalls naivety, childhood and nostalgia. In this project entitled music.box, the ringing melodies will be like an ode to the memories and various losses that go through human life.
With music.box, I would like to challenge and seduce those who will pass in front of Sporobole’s sound wall. The music will slowly appear and disappear on the speakers to inspire softness and rest. The listener will be able to listen to the work from a distance, but also get closer and choose which speaker to listen to when moving along the wall. This showcase will be a kind of public concert hall in which music.box will be played continuously, a museum hall where music can be contemplated endlessly.
– Pierre-Luc Senécal
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Pierre-Luc Lecours / Illusory Truth Effect / Residence at Sporobole from January 28 to February 10 2019
Illusory Truth Effect is the tendency to believe that information is true after repeated exposure to it. This phenomenon was identified by Hasher and Goldstein in a 1977 study conducted at Villanova University and Temple University. The project I would like to do at Sporobole is a sound installation that musically and creatively explores the Illusory Truth Effect phenomenon. The sound work would be done with a vocal actor and actress. Sentences containing an ambiguous statement would be recorded several times, with different emotional nuances and different cadences. The dictated sentences would be found from searches on alternative information sites, and would echo false information circulating on the web. The content of the sentences could be banal or controversial. I would like to engage the listener by provoking a questioning about what he hears and how he hears it, while making the material musically interesting.
My objective is to create about ten 2-3 minutes pieces, where each miniature explores a musical idea related to different techniques: repetition, phase shift, distortion of a signal, variation in the reading speed of a message, use of multiphony to spatialize the message, etc.
This project is part of a recent creative process, which aims to establish a correlation between form, format and content. The idea is to establish a close link between the way a material is presented, in addition to its articulation and meaning. For Illusory Truth Effect, the way the material is musicalized would then be in phase with the message conveyed by the recorded sentences, on the one hand, and by the broadcasting device, on the other hand.
This idea of repeated sentences and varied emotions is partly inspired by Bruce Nauman’s Good Boy Bad Boy. This project would be my first opportunity to create a sound installation and work with vocal actors. This is an interesting challenge and a key milestone in my career as a designer.
– Pierre-Luc Lecours
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
