Day 2: IRCAM

In the tree department, one might say, things are certainly looking up.

One might then shoot oneself.

Basically one thing of any importance happened today, and that one thing was IRCAM. For those of you who don't know, IRCAM is (or perhaps was) the premier computer music research institute in the world. Situated at 1 Place Igor Stravinsky (lol), IRCAM was founded in 1974 under the direction of Pierre Boulez by direct order of Georges Pompidou, then president of France. That's a direct transliteration from the French Wikipedia on IRCAM. Yes, I agree, it's ridiculous to think of Pompidou, a man whose name is exceeded in silliness only by his track record, giving Boulez a "direct order" to construct a research institute for completely useless musical frivolity. You have to remember: this is Paris. Eggs aren't refrigerated. The parks have fucking moats. If you go walking through the 4th arrondissment you might think to yourself "This neighborhood is pretty bourgeois." Then you look up.

Above: The kind of shit one cannot make up

IRCAM sits aside the Pompidou center for the arts, which is so stuffed to the gills with l'abstract and formalisme and other avant-garde shit that there is no room for anything else, not even plumbing. To get from floor to floor you first walk outside, then up a giant hamster tube for people.

The giant white tubes are where the art comes from.

Rarely, rarely do these stairs become a waterslide.

In this alley, the ghost of Georges Pompidou will tickle you with an ostrich feather

People love to sit on the cobblestones in the shadow of the Pompidou Center. No one knows why

The Façade of IRCAM proper

IRCAM itself is a terrifying musical iceberg, its quaint and unassuming offices resting on a massive underground deposit of musical activity. Extending some one hundred feet beneath the surface are numerous studios and offices, an anechoic chamber and an enormous robot concert hall that must be seen to be believed. More on that later.

The highly chemical and mentally unhinged fountain collection outside IRCAM.

I met EJ, my fellow Cycling '74 colleague, at 1 or so for lunch and a quick tour of the facilities. Lunch was delicious but shattered all of my expectations about what the day would hold. First, and perhaps most importantly, French people do not typically drink wine with lunch. But also, evidently IRCAM was not the acousmatic Charley and the Chocolate Factory that I had been hoping for. Asked what the coolest new developments were at IRCAM, EJ paused, thought for a bit, then replied that development is a funny word. This was the beginning of a long discussion. We spoke at length about the politics of music production, about the diverse fields of study of the researchers at the institution and about the difference between French and German performers (I suspect that European citizens can only exist when contrasted with one of their neighbors). But after spelunking the depths of la belle IRCAM I have come to one overarching conclusion. I offer it here, by way of résumé:

IRCAM does not give a fuck.

Very simply, IRCAM could not care less whether or not you, sitting in your basement, laying down one of your "tracks" or perhaps a "jam", achieve any measure of musical success, be it aesthetic or financial. One thing matters to IRCAM, and that is research. Progress. The have it in mind to do very impractical and very ridiculous things. If those things require a budget exceeding the GDP of a medium-sized dictatorship or equipment unattainable by anyone without several PhD's and his own space program well, then so be it. There is no "you" in IRCAM.

IRCAM's 32-speaker spacialization array.

EJ shows me the anechoic chamber. In this room, you can hear the blood flowing in your skull.

 Oh, that? No big deal. That's just IRCAM's fully reconfigurable, modular performance and sound projection space. Reconfigurable how? Oh, you know, the ceiling can be raised and lowered automatically from three meters to twenty meters. Also, all those little slots in the wall are actually robotic panels that can shift and rotate to affect the acoustics of the room. You know, like the panels from the game Portal that were so whimsical and improbably that they couldn't possibly exist. Anyway, those exist. Last but not least, you see that giant black line in the first picture? That's actually 128 speakers, all tuned for wave propagation. In other words, they let you spacialize sound, just like a pair of stereo speakers, except with actual wavefront coherence. That means the whole room can be a sweet spot or, alternatively, sound can be directed to a single point.

In closing, I don't know quite what to say about IRCAM. On one level it's some kind of dream come true. Unbelievable facilities, brilliant researchers, French language; it looks like it has everything. But at the same time my digs are all in making software that's both powerful and accessible. Software like a Snuggie with a handgun, software that can turn your mother into Basquiat (in a good way). Whether or not IRCAM is the place to make it happen, that remains to be seen.

Finally, I thought this bus sounded like a space ship.