"Since opening in 1977, IRCAM has been a place where contemporary composers can realise ideas beyond the reach of traditional instruments and vocalists."

With its network of pipes and cables crawling over the outside of the building, the Pompidou Centre is one of Paris's most memorable landmarks. Visitors confronted with it might be forgiven for overlooking the more understated building next door. Yet however taciturn it may appear on the outside, the inner workings of IRCAM have had as dramatic an effect upon the world of sound as the inside-out Pompidou Centre had on architecture.

Since opening in 1977, IRCAM - the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination) - has been a place where contemporary composers can realise ideas beyond the reach of traditional instruments and vocalists. Housed in a building also designed by Pompidou Centre architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, it was founded when the French president, Georges Pompidou, invited the composer Pierre Boulez to oversee an institution dedicated to sound research.

In addition to his work in serialism and aleatory (chance-based) music, Boulez was interested in electronics and sound manipulation. In the years following its foundation, IRCAM made breakthroughs in areas such as real-time processing: instead of being limited to recording electronic pieces on tape, composers could create dynamic works in which computers reacted to a sound within microseconds of its production. Composers were invited to the institute, where technicians would assist them in realising new commissions using cutting-edge technology. They could make instruments sound like they never had before, or combine sources to create new ones. Over many years, HCMF has had a close association with IRCAM and two of this year's featured composers, Jonathan Harvey and Emmanuel Nunes, have produced several works in this environment, including Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco; Bhakti; Ritual Melodies and Advaya; and Nunes' Lichtung I and Lichtung II.

IRCAM is more than a sandbox for technicians and composers, however. The institute's Ensemble InterContemporain is a chamber orchestra whose flexible size and configuration has proved influential. A concert season and annual festival, AGORA, provide an essential outlet for developments in contemporary music. And many of IRCAM's innovations are available to musicians working beyond its walls: their website currently offers software packages such as voice processor SuperVP, and Modalys, which enables users to create a virtual musical instrument out of everyday objects. In the wider world, IRCAM expertise allowed viewers of the 1994 film Farinelli to hear the lost voice of a castrato, recreated by merging the waveforms of male and female singers.

Today the kind of effects pioneered by IRCAM in the 1970s may be available to every bedroom producer with a laptop, but the institute continues to explore the limits of sonic knowledge. Under present-day director Frank Madlener, current research areas include the psychology of sound perception, work on room acoustics that could enhance our experience of concert halls and studies in instrumental acoustics that answer questions such as how a specific sound arises from the breath that produced it.

IRCAM's website offers a wealth of resources, incorporating a multimedia library, composer information and specialised search tools for contemporary music. The institute plays a vital part in the Europe-wide CASPAR project, which aims to ensure the preservation of digital data into the future. On the performance side, recent works include Hypermusic, a collaboration between composer Hèctor Parra and physicist Lisa Randall billed as ‘A Projective Opera in Seven Planes'. It seems that these days the Pompidou Centre's mysterious neighbour shows its inner workings in endless ways.

Book tickets now for events featuring the work of Jonathan Harvey and Emmanuel Nunes. Online prices from £9.

IRCAM website in English.

 

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