Laurent et Vincent Isnard 1/2 : Acousmatic massages
Amongst the new artistic research residencies that started in 2024, one led by an atypical duo explores the concept of ‘acousmatic massage’ – a project that walks the line between artistic performance and therapeutic practice.
An atypical residency indeed, for two main reasons. First, because it is led by two brothers, Vincent and Laurent Isnard. Second, because although music is an important part of their lives, neither of them actually are professional musicians. Indeed, despite having graduated from the CRR of Paris (conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Paris) and his job as computer music designer and sound engineer, Vincent focuses mainly on the notion of auditory perception in his research. He has in fact conducted his PhD thesis at IRCAM, after completing the master ATIAM (Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science applied to Music). As for Laurent, he is a performer and visual artist who transfers his musical practice into the creation of artistic projects where sound plays a key role. Those projects include several collaborations with his brother, which invariably broke the mold of musical conventions.
Amongst the performances Laurent participated in as well as those he himself conceived, one experience was fundamental in the launching of their artistic research residency. He remembers:
“It was a sort of workshop with a few other people. We were all just walking around with our eyes closed, guided only by vocal instructions across a darkened room where all types of sounds were broadcasted. At some specific times along the way, we were invited to briefly open our eyes just long enough to catch a glimpse of a few vivid images, like a snapshot. This kind of experience completely disrupts your sensory perception and forces you to focus on other sensations: tactile, auditory, proprioceptive… It is a unique kind of performative art.
Ensemble Irma © Deborah Lopatin
His curiosity now piqued, Laurent shared his experience with his brother, whose thesis focused on – you guessed it – a relatively similar subject: the human capacity to recognize natural sounds, or on the contrary, mistake them for other sounds. That is how the concept of ‘acousmatic massage’ came into being. The term ‘massage’ refers to the body and the way it is treated, in a therapeutic perspective or at least one of well-being (without necessarily making a connection to the well-known concept of ‘sound massages’), while the term ‘acousmatic’ refers to its etymological sense: a sound that is heard without an originating cause being seen.
With the emergence of this concept came the necessity to refine its definition and protocol and to explore all its possibilities: this is what led us to undertake this artistic research residency.
In theory, the concept of acousmatic massage is relatively clear. The brothers explain: “The session needs to be conducted with your eyes closed. Sounds are broadcasted in the space all around you, but their source can be neither identified or located – the source can very punctually be put, or not, in direct contact with the body of the person that is being massaged. Most of the sounds are made by manipulating (through friction, clinking, etc.) common objects or objects that have been recycled, or sometimes reassembled. Those can be a salad bowl half-filled with sand mixed up with a piece of wood, or a marble that rolls on a piece of corrugated metal sheet, etc. What matters when it comes to optimizing sound production, is the sound rather than the instrument itself. The idea is to dissociate the nature of the sound source and the sound that is produced in order to prevent any possibility of identification and therefore to stimulate the imagination.”
Séance de massage acousmatique © Doborah Lopatin
For the rest, everything is yet to be done. This residency has a dual objective: first artistic, then therapeutic, with the purpose of improving the well-being of others – one of the goals of their research being to redefine for both a proper framework.
Vincent explains:
“Following an artistic perspective, how can we produce a sound performance or discourse of a new kind? What objects and devices do we need to use in order to guarantee the reproducibility of the performance? And what about the settings – can it be recreated with several contributors and participants, and in what proportions? Following a therapeutic perspective, considering the proven virtues of music, how can we transform acousmatic massages into a healing practice?”
As part of this residency, a perceptual experiment will be conducted, involving approximately sixty participants (who will be divided into two even groups: the first made up of people already familiar with this kind of artistic practices, and the second of people who are new to it). The goal of this experiment is first to collect their impressions: do they consider the acousmatic massage to be a kind of music or sound performance, or a relaxation technique or a similar practice that can have a beneficial influence on their state of consciousness? Then, this experiment can help refine the protocol and identify what works and what does not depending on the sound object that is used, their trajectory within the space, the way the experiment has been introduced to the participants and in which social context, etc. It also helps to identify the relevant perceptual parameters, in view of constituting a corpus of spatialized sounds that are conducive to the creation of this kind of sound environment, by the end of their research project.
Finally, a series of standardized, rigorous and scientifically precise surveys will be distributed to the participants in order to assess the extent to which this kind of massages can be considered as a therapeutic practice as well as the beneficial effects they can have on our mental states and emotional reactions.
This residency offers the opportunity for an interesting convergence between art and scientific research in the field of sound perception…
Interview conducted by Jérémie Szpirglas