Paris Excursion: Some Highlights on IRCAM Forum Workshops 2026

This blog is the first of a two-part retrospective on the excursion that we, the first-year sound design students, took to Paris. The trip took place in March and centred around the IRCAM Forum Workshops, a week of presentations, workshops, and demonstrations hosted by IRCAM, a French institute for research in music and sound. The programme ran from Tuesday to Saturday across two venues. In this post, I will highlight two sessions that stood out to me from each location.

GRM Tools Atelier Workshop

Starting off with a workshop which took place at the IRCAM building (located alongside the Centre Pompidou on Place Igor Stravinsky), the presentation introduced GRM Tools Atelier, a modular real-time environment for sound processing and synthesis developed by INA GRM. The developers behind the project demonstrated it as a creative space where sound can be built, transformed, and explored through a network of connected modules. The main focus was on experimentation, encouraging users to discover new sounds by combining simple building blocks in somewhat unconventional ways.

For me, the highlight was seeing their comb filter both on its own and in combination with other modules. I was surprised by the variety of results that could be achieved with a simple sound synthesis concept and by the potential the plugin itself offered through additional controls such as harmonic manipulation, morphing, and interaction with other modules.

That being said, as a student, purchasing software like this is not always realistic, and in this case, I am not convinced owning the plugin itself is necessarily the most important takeaway. The principles demonstrated during the session can be applied using open-source platforms, like SuperCollider. Ultimately, the value I took from this session was less about the software itself and more about the ideas behind it. What initially appeared to be a presentation of a new tool was, from my perspective, a sound design lesson disguised as a software demonstration, and I am grateful for the experience, as it encouraged me to think about familiar processes in a broader creative context.

Demonstration of an Augmented Instrument

Also taking place at the IRCAM building, as part of Remix (an IRCAM showcase presenting the first results of several hybrid artistic research groups), the presentation by Katalin Koltai, a guitarist, researcher, and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in London, focused on the progress of her ongoing research into augmenting the classical guitar. In this context, “augmented” refers to a traditional acoustic instrument that has been enhanced with additional mechanical and/or electronic components to expand its sonic capabilities while maintaining the feel and playing techniques of the original instrument.

Their form of augmentation comes in the shape of the Open Frets Guitar, a prototype featuring a reconfigurable magnetic fretboard that allows the layout of the frets to be altered. This opens up possibilities for alternative tunings and microtonal performance, which stood out to me as I usually use non-standard tunings in my own guitar practice. Alongside this, the prototype featured the use of exciters, a type of electroacoustic transducer, used to make the strings and body of the guitar resonate.

The use of exciters also reminded me of a piece I made, 3.2.2024., for which I placed an exciter beneath the soundboard of a concert piano. The sound coming from the exciter was used to vibrate the body and strings of the piano, creating a natural filter whose strength depended on the amount of sustain pedal used. This practice is not new, but I personally enjoy seeing what others come up with and the different ways in which they enrich the sound. That was the general highlight of the presentation for me.

An Audiovisual Performance using Setar

Moving to the second location of the excursion, the transdisciplinary venue Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains, a performance rather than a talk that stood out to me was Moving With Time by Seyed Ali Hosseini, a composer and researcher in electronic music; and Giuseppe Messineo, a composer and coder working with interactive audiovisual systems. The piece was an audiovisual real-time interaction performance exploring the evolving relationship between sound, image, and culture.

My highlight was definitely the beginning of the performance, which involved the use of the setar, a traditional Iranian lute, alongside vocal chops and visuals generated through TouchDesigner. Combined with the spatial audio setup, in which speakers were arranged in a circular formation, the performance created an atmosphere that was easy to become immersed in. As the piece progressed, so did the sound material and its context. As the name of the composition implies, it evolved over time, doing so by blending elements of electroacoustic music with a more dance-oriented approach.

Something I learned after reading more about the project was the use of concatenative synthesis, a type of synthesis that builds sounds by stitching together short samples from a larger sound database. Unlike granular synthesis, another sample-based technique that they used, concatenative synthesis allows recorded material to be analysed and reorganised based on specific characteristics rather than by manipulating small sound grains directly. The combination of these techniques allowed the original acoustic material to gradually transform into something much further removed from its source.

EEG Audio-Visual Performance on Pleasure

Lastly, I’d like to mention one more performance, which also took place at CDA, Liberated Frequencies by Keigo Yoshida, a Japanese artist and doctoral researcher whom I met during the forum week.

The performance was an audiovisual exploration of the relationship between artificial intelligence and human perception of sound. Alongside his assistant and narrator, Rinko Oka, they monitored brain activity using EEG sensors, a type of sensor used to record the electrical activity of the brain, and isolate brain waves related to pleasure. During the development process, Yoshida had previously tested his collaborator’s perception of different sounds, collecting responses to various sonic materials. These responses were then used alongside EEG during the performance, allowing the system to react to the collaborator’s auditory perception. The visuals were done in TouchDesigner.

I found the dialogue between the listener’s preferences and the system particularly interesting. Rather than moving towards comfort and familiarity, it deliberately generated a harsher soundscape, leaning on post-human-centred aesthetics in which human preference is no longer the only measure of value.

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