Paris and IRCAM Excursion
Paris was beautiful. Since it was my first time seeing the city, I do not really have any complaints about the city itself. The museums we visited and the areas we explored were useful, carefully maintained and special places. It was also good to experience the atmosphere of Paris outside of only reading or hearing about it.
Naturally, the trip was very expensive. My criticism is more about the support around the excursion. I think the school did not provide enough support, and some of the support that was promised did not arrive in a timely way. For example, the IRCAM conference ticket was not a surprising or unexpected cost. It was a expected fee from the beginning, so I think the school could have at least covered that part. They did not, and that was frustrating. Still, in the end, I had the opportunity to see Paris, and I am happy about that.
Apart from the financial side, I liked visiting IRCAM. It is clearly a very established institution, and it has pioneered many things in the field of sound, music technology and computer music. It is also valuable that they hold this conference every year and bring people together around these topics.
At the same time, I also felt a little disappointed. As many of my friends noticed as well, IRCAM felt a bit outdated and overly commercialised in some parts. Maybe this is normal for a large institution with a long history, but I expected some of the work to feel more experimental and more forward-looking.
Some of the people I met were helpful, and some were not, but that is not the most important point for me. What bothered me more was that some presentations felt too outdated for an institution that sees itself as a frontrunner in audio technologies. For example, there was a presentation about audio in gambling. In short, the presenter sonified gambling data in Pure Data. Of course, the patch itself was fine, and I do not want to disrespect the work. But as a topic, it felt very simple and outdated for a place like IRCAM.
This is only my personal opinion, but I expected a stronger level of experimentation and technological relevance. Still, the excursion was useful overall. Seeing Paris, visiting IRCAM and observing both the strong and weak sides of such an important institution helped me understand the field more realistically.
