Isabelle Sabrié, artist who composes to the sounds of the Amazon forest
He chose a small place far from the city center. It is unthinkable that Isabelle Sabrie could be further away from the Amazon forest, her main tool of work. Isabelle Sabri, a tall, green-haired former Parisian, has long traveled the world performing concerts as a soprano soloist. At the time, he received international songwriting awards and translated Queen of the Night before an incident during a tour in Guyana in December 2006 changed his life. ” We usually travel, but we take care not to get drafts, we don’t eat anything, we don’t go out.he says. We practice, study and then leave. But I stayed there in the forest for three hours. It was unusual and it was the first time I had such a big shock. »
What surprises Isabelle Sabriye is that despite the large number of animals, she is able to distinguish the sound each one makes. In order to better understand this phenomenon, he decides to settle in Manaus, the capital of Amazonia in Brazil, after a few months. The university is just looking for a singing teacher. He applied, got hired, and can now devote his free time to recording forest sounds. “II was just doing it from home, he recalls. JI put the recorder in the garden, listened, but it took me more than a year. For example, the first time I heard frogs, I realized that they had positions in space corresponding to their positions in time… For example, there was a frog on the left, a frog on the right, and a frog in the middle. behind. The first two seemed to answer each other in silence between their grunts, and when the middle one spoke, a voice rose in the midst of the silence. And one morning while listening I suddenly understood. there is to win ordinary, I can pass the time listening to the sounds of the forest “.
Rhythmic-spatial harmony
In 2012, Isabelle Sabrie theorized a technique she called rhythmic-spatial harmony, which allows the creation of new sensations, a bit like 3D cinema, by placing musicians around the audience in an opera and transferring sound from one to another. . In the opera he is currently composing, there is a scene where the hero Marcus goes mad. Four drums are located in the four corners of the room, allowing the sound to swirl around the audience in a frenzied circle like Marcus’s madness.
Two scientific studies were published in 2017 and 2019 New York Academy of Sciences Confirm Isabelle Sabrie’s observations: ” This commonality observed in many different accounts of communicative interaction suggests an interesting hypothesis: all types of human and nonhuman communicative interaction may exhibit the same kind of temporal hierarchical structure that depends on a particular communicative function, less so on type or medium. sound production. Such a result, if confirmed, suggests that speech, music, and animal sounds all conform to a general pattern of hierarchical temporal structure.. ».
The Teatro de Manaus, which supports Isabelle Sabrie’s research, presented the first performance in this format in several years. Marcelo de Jesus, conductor of the Amazonas Filarmônica symphony orchestra of Manaus, conducted this performance and has a precious memory of it: “ I had the honor of presenting one of his works at the Teatro Amazonas. You hear the music with a spatial dimension, which is not just Italian and French, but where the music reaches the audience from the stage. There were also musicians in the pit and boxes. I looked towards the audience, leading the orchestra behind me. As an audience, you see the conductor, and the music comes from places other than the stage. It was a truly unique experience for those who were there that night. »
Isabelle Sabrie is currently composing her first rhythmic-spatial opera to be presented at the next Amazonas de Opera festival, the largest opera festival in South America.
