Cultural Mediation at Middle School Students
Cultural mediation projects play an essential role in bridging the gap between artistic proposals and audiences; they encourage the emergence of an aesthetic experience and provide the public with the means to access new forms of interpretation.
The Cultural Outreach department offers projects for schools and higher education establishments, designed to encourage encounters with works and artists, practice and experimentation, in conjunction with our artistic season and the ManiFeste festival. These workshops take place over several sessions, led by educators and/or artists, and culminate in a participatory project linked to a work programmed by IRCAM as a part of our season or during our festival in June. During the workshops, participants visit IRCAM and attend a performance of the work that inspired them! The participants' project is presented at the school and, if possible, at IRCAM or the Centre Pompidou.
Information transmission@ircam.fr
Partnership with Collège Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo Students Explore ManiFeste
L’Ircam a invité une classe de 3ème du collège Victor Hugo, à découvrir son festival annuel, Manifeste, entre mai et juin 2025.
Durant ce projet, les élèves ont pu s’initier à la création musicale d’aujourd’hui, découvrir les coulisses d’un festival, s’interroger sur les sujets soulevés par les œuvres et les traiter via le podcast, médium choisi pour initier les élèves à la captation sonore. Lors de leurs visites à l’Ircam, ce projet a été l’occasion de rencontrer les professionnel·les qui font les œuvres de ce festival pluridisciplinaire, l’occasion pour les élèves d’interviewer leurs interlocuteurs afin de partager ces rencontres aux auditeur·ices du podcast.
Découvrez les épisodes sur notre site ou sur Spotify !
CHAM Students Discover L’Ombre
In January 2025, IRCAM offered the Conservatoire du Centre an educational outreach workshop in connection to L’Ombre, a choreographic performance in an augmented reality environment by Blanca Li. The workshop brought together 6th and 7th-grade students in CHAD from the W.A. Mozart Conservatory Paris Centre, along with students from Collège Victor Hugo in Paris.
The students were first invited to attend the performance at IRCAM, before returning for a half-day workshop combining dance practice and an introduction to the technological setup. This workshop also gave them the opportunity to meet the artistic and technical teams behind L’Ombre.
Les élèves de la clase CHAM à l'Ircam
1001 Voices — Building the Bestiorobot and IRCAM
Bestiorobot is a research-creation project led by the association Les Causeuses and co-produced by IRCAM, with additional support from SCAI (Sorbonne Université). Conceived by Clotilde Chevet, researcher in information and communication sciences, and Zoé Aegerter, designer, the project offers a form of mediation that is both technological and artistic, centered on speaking machines.
1001 Voices — Building the Bestiorobot has now evolved into a program of mediation workshops and research-creation activities, aimed at producing an original work that explores a new facet of the project. Since 2022, it has taken place in schools and partner institutions, in collaboration with Ircam’s Department of Cultural Outreach.
The Bestiorobot Assembly
Throughout the 2023-2024 school year, two classes of 6th graders at Joliot Curie secondary school in Bagneux were invited to take part in a collective sound creation project on the theme of conversational agents.
Working with the association les Causeuses, in collaboration with IRCAM and sound designer Romain Barthélémy, the aim of the project was to explore the concepts of artificial intelligence, synthesised voices, and conversational agents with the students.
Based on the students' writings, produced in collaboration with their French teacher Marie Le Maout, The Bestiorobot Assembly explores current affairs and social issues, but also questions their raison d'être as Bestiorobots...
The piece was presented as an octophonic sound installation at the Maison de la Musique et de la Danse in Bagneux on June 27, 2024.
Listen the assembly of bestiorobots
Bestiorobot at the Cité Internationale de la Langue Française
In 2024/2025, Ircam partnered with the Cité Internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts and the Collège de Belleu to offer a new exploration of the Bestiorobot through five workshop sessions held at the school.
The final presentation took the form of an exploratory performance for sixth-grade students: placed behind a giant mock-up of a smartphone screen, the students were invited to move across the stage as if they themselves were parts of a conversational agent’s algorithm. They moved over sonograms cut into balsa wood and laid out on the auditorium floor, or across clusters of confetti representing granular sounds, or even across a keyboard… Each movement triggered sounds, phrases, and questions recorded in class, bringing the Bestiorobot to life and allowing the students to discover their collective creation.
Fantasy Island
During the 2023-24 school year, 6th grade students from the SEGPA of the collège Hector Berlioz, 18ème, Paris. This project, conducted in collaboration with composer Sébastien Gaxie, aimed to introduce the class to the profession of composer by helping them to create an imaginary bestiary together.
Over the course of ten or so sessions, the students were invited to create a universe for a fantastic island, accompanied by the composer Sébastien Gaxie and the IRCAM teams.
The 6th graders were encouraged to question the different stages of a composer's work throughout the project, from discovering the composer's craft, an introduction to listening and the notions of soundscape, to the use of artificial intelligence.
The project was presented to the public and installed over a two-week period in the Jacqueline de Romilly library, next to their school, to give the students a chance to get involved in the local community. Many thanks to the library staff for hosting this project.
Discover the soundscape of Fantasy Island
Fichier son
Replay
Create a sound work collectively with audio-digital creation tools
Launched by the European network Ulysses, with the support of Creative Europe, "Replay Culture Heritage" will be carried out from 2021 to 2023. It offers a class of high school students the opportunity to learn about sound creation by discovering and re-appropriating a major work of contemporary music.
Review of the successful Replay Culture Heritage project
Objectives
- Allow students to discover IRCAM's particularities
- Give students their first look at the use of digital audio tools for music creation
- Provide students with the opportunity to discover a contemporary work and understand its compositional challenges
- Encourage students to work together to create a remake of this work, which will be presented at the end of the program during a national presentation day
The program
Like the other participating countries, IRCAM will select a contemporary musical work. This work will be the starting point of the project.
1. Discovery of the Work
The piece is presented to the students in different forms and contexts. Students will use it to produce a musical work of their own inspired by and related to the work studied, reflecting their conception of the work and what it represents.
2. Collecting “Sound Material”
In order to create their own sound work, students collect sounds that they can later use.
3. Creation of a Sound Work
Using various materials collected, students produce their own sound creations, in reference to and echoing the work they have studied. Their work is presented to the public in the spring.
2023-2024 Project
For the 3rd year running, IRCAM has joined forces with the Joliot Curie secondary school. Students from the ‘cordées réussées’ were invited to discover the work Trio by Simon Steen Andersen in the company of SaÏda Bouaïss (librarian) and François Vey (composer).
Restitution des élèves au Centre Pompidou, juin 2024
Inspired by this work, the students were guided through roughly 10 workshops to work together and create a sonic and visual work, Replay Trio, which they presented at the Centre Pompidou on June 22, 2024.
VIDÉO
The project also received support from the DRAC Île-de-France..
Project 2022-2023
Classe 2022-2023 des cordées de la réussite du collège Joliot Curie à Bagneux © Ircam-Centre Pompidou, photo : Quentin Chevrier
A dozen "cordées de la réussite" students from the Joliot Curie secondary school in Bagneux were invited to discover and reinterpret Laborintus II in order to make it their own. The educational workshops were run by sound designer Kinda Hassan and Saïda Bouaïss, the school's librarian, with the aim of creating a collective piece of electronic music inspired by Luciano Berio's work.
Review of the 2022-2023 project around Laborintus II
Final work, Replay Laborintus II
Project 2021-2022
Replay, séance de travail avec Claudia Jane Scroccaro, projet 2021-2022 © Ircam-Centre Pompidou, photo : Salomé Bazin
Twelve ninth-graders from the Joliot Curie secondary school were invited to discover Steve Reich's work "Come out" and the film "Fase", directed by Thierry de Mey, with choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michele Anne de Mey. A dozen workshops were held from December 2021 to May 2022, leading up to a public performance in the Centre Pompidou cinema.
Final Work, JE NE SAIS PAS QUOI FAIRE COMME BRUIT
Information
Public junior high and high school classes
Number of Sessions 5-10 sessions
Contact 01 44 78 47 70 | emmanuelle.zoll (at) ircam.fr
This project was implemented within the framework of the ULYSSES Network, co-financed by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
