What is Acquamatics?

On July 6-8, on the new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, with the support of the French Institute and the Austrian Cultural Forum, the first Acousmonium festival in Russia will be held. A series of live concerts, installations and master classes on a unique multi-channel sound system developed in 1974 in Paris will be held in St. Petersburg.

In 1948, the French engineer, theorist and composer Pierre Schaeffer made a musical revolution, proposing the method of creating music by the composer in direct contact with the material (at that time vinyl, a film, microphone and various means of sound processing), called Musique Concrè TE - “specific music”. He called the traditional composition of the composition through a musical letter, as not having a direct physical attitude to the sound.

The group of musical research (GRM) founded by Schaeffer began to develop the theory and instrumentation in the Concr è TE paradigm, and in 1974 his student, by that time , the director of GRM , composer Francois Bayle presented his project that adds spatial measurement, the orchestra of the loudspeakers.

The orchestra consists of in a special way throughout the space of loudspeakers of various shapes, sizes and frequency characteristics and distribution console. All this together forms a tool with which the performer - Projectionist - creates a spatial sound canvas.

Beil called his approach “obcmatics”, which with a reference to the Pythagor means a rupture of the visual association between the sound and the object that produces it. Thus, in the process of execution, the listener generates his own audiovisual semantic constructions, reconstructing imaginary sound sources. The author gave his orchestra the name "Acusmonium".

Since then, various modifications of the “Acumonium” have appeared in the UK, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and other countries, many musical works have been created and continued to be created for the “Acumonium”.

On July 6-8, the first Russian Acouusmonium festival will be held on the new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater (St. Petersburg), in which, in addition to the key composers of Austria and Austria, the workshop Francois Baile will perform their works.

Before the start of the festival, his curator is the composer Patrick K.-H. He invited the festival to reflect on spatial music, its practices and terminology.