Email: tanguy.pocquet@gmail.com Website: https://tanguypocquet.com Thesis Title Portfolio of compositions: Creating electroacoustic compositions through the sonification of recursive neural networks Exploring the creative use of in-training data for informational and monitoring purposes Institution The University of Manchester

This activity involved going to see Ryoji Ikeda’s (as well as Ash Fure and Lise Barkas & Yann Leguay’s) work being presented within IRCAM’s Electro-Odyssée event.
The aims were to observe and learn from his spatial diffusion of sound (a crucial part of the researcher’s own work); to witness the live-setting of extremely precise data-driven electronics (the type of materials that the researcher also focuses on) both visually and sonically; and to hopefully gain from the other artists that were presenting their work, and from IRCAM’s environment more generally, as a research centre in music, acoustics and technology – all fields that the researcher’s project falls into.
The researcher saw this work two nights in a row, using the first as an opportunity to experience the work as they usually would, noting moments they thought crucial artistically and technically, while in the second they focused intently on those moments, hypothesising on the processes that might have produced them.
The researcher found themselves assessing Ikeda’s use of data as a driving force for audio-visual art. In his work, he seems to have little concern for the intelligibility of the data in the final output, instead using it simply as a generative tool for process-based artworks. This goes against the researcher’s own approach, where intelligibility of the data is crucial, and the sonification aims to inform the listener of the transformations happening to the numerical information used to generate it.
As a result, the researcher has specifically focused on approaching the data as more than simply a generative tool, instead treating as the central element of the sonic output, all while using sounds and processes not too dissimilar to those used by Ikeda.
Another impact this activity has had on the researcher’s research comes from the work of Lise Barkas and Yann Leguay, presented before that of Ikeda. The two artists combined instrumental drone sounds with highly synthetic electronic sounds.
This combination is one that the researcher has begun focusing on in their own work, as part of a reflection to implement materials recently written for ensembles such as Riot ensemble and Distractfold into the practical output of their research. Specifically, the combination of sounds from an instrumental drone tradition and from glitch and noise genres of electronic music, and the aesthetic and semantic implications this has in sonification works based on algorithmic data, have been a particular focus of the researcher’s work. Hence, seeing this sort of combination being put into practice by these musicians was extremely interesting, useful, but also engaging.

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