« PrÉ » : connected polyphonic immersion Jean-François Trubert Université Côte d’Azur Nice, France trubert@unice.fr Bertrand Petit INRIA Nice, France bertrand.petit@inria.fr Camille Giuglaris Université Côte d’Azur Nice, France camille.giuglaris@gmail.com Jean-Luc Hervé Composer Paris, France herve.jeanluc@free.fr ABSTRACT By introducing the spatial dimension in the musical creation, a plastic parameter has been imagined already since antiquity, playing both on the structuring of spaces, and on the structuring of the effect of presence. Taking up the classifications of the sign theorist Charles Sanders Pierce, the sound as an index has always been - by its physical capacity to reach the eardrums of the spectator - the main vector of the idea of immersion. Music and sound have thus become credible forms of extended reality. The present project thus aims to work on this notion of acoustic and immersive environment as well as on the "space" of play thus created - a form of extended reality through music, or even music augmented by forms of objects and devices [1] through a study of the creative processes for the composition by the PrÉ device of Jean-Luc Hervé, composer associated with the project. The PrÉ device (for electroacoustic presence) is a multichannel diffusion system based on a singular conception of the relation of sound to place. It creates a sound environment where the audience is surrounded by multiple invisible sound sources. The system is designed to have a large number of independent voices to constitute a large polyphony. It consists of a park that can go up to several dozen sound agents, each associating a nano-computer with a mini- loudspeaker, running on batteries. The whole park is connected by a network in HOP web language controlled by a main computer, which allows to free itself from any wiring and to easily hide the sound agents in order to make the device invisible. 1. Introduction The project has several objectives: - Develop all-in-one modules (microcomputer, speaker, amplifier, battery), robust, easily handled and rechargeable, with an optimized acoustic quality. - Program a simple user interface. - Program a 3D audio environment allowing to simulate the device with a binaural listening, and thus to work the polyphonic composition upstream with the headphones. - Adding audio (computer music) and control (IOT) functionalities - Extend the park to a larger number of agents (64) The goal is to make it a more generic and easy way to use system, which can be used by other composers, but also in other artistic fields (sound installation, theater, dance), pedagogical or in any field where such a system of independent, localized and proximity multi-broadcasting could be used to create a sound environment (for therapeutic purposes for example...) - Musicology of things, performance and musical narrativity in immersive systems In parallel, the question of the study of the creative process is posed according to a double point of view: does the production circuit influence the phases of creation? Does the technological use have an incidence on the global aesthetics of the piece [2] ? The second question concerns musical narrativity and the study of performance. If analytical tools have been conceived to account for the construction and renewal of musical forms [3] few studies except in the field of Sound Studies [4] attempt to grasp the interaction between sound and space by mobilizing adapted tools (translation of spaces, acoustic fingerprint, spectral averaging, frequency analysis, spectral analysis). The last question concerns a new field for musicology: the object or the device, and joins multiple realities (IoMusT, sound object, space, diffusers, transmitters) notion thought not as reduced to an artifact, but as a device at the same time real and tangible but also social and symbolic [5]. This displacement of the thought allows to inscribe the musicological study in the same chain of workflow, that is to say from the starting point of the production. 2. Methodology The methodology concerns the in situ study of the development of a spatialized scholarly musical work and of technologies linked to spatialization and immersion devices.