Jean-Baptiste Masson is a composer and post-doctoral researcher working on the history of the sonic practices of amateurs. His music is interested in beatings, the dramatisation of listening, the dynamism of stasis. He composes for instruments, voices, electronics, practices field recording, and plays within the bands Jah Poney and Colonne Drone. After several years of collaboration with music psychology laboratories in France and Belgium, he worked with the National Centre for Musical Creation Césaré (Reims, France), to develop sound tools for people suffering of neurodegenerative diseases. After a PhD at the University of York, he is at the moment a Marie Skłodowska-Curie / Bienvenüe fellow based at the Université Rennes-2 and a research fellow at the Cinémathèque de Bretagne, where he works on a manual for the restoration of the sound of amateur films.
Featured Transmission(s):
- Aired on May 26th 08:30 CEST 2024
- Magnetic Remnants
- Genre: Electroacoustic music
- Duration: 30 min
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Magnetic Remnants is based on found materials, recorded by amateur sound hobbyists in France and Germany between the 1960s and the 1990s. The tapes and cassettes were collected in the two countries last Summer, while on trip to investigate the sonic practices of French and German sound hunters. People were interviewed, and sonic material gathered. Sound hunters were amateurs interested in sound, who, from the 1950s, started to produce radio programmes, to organise national and international contests, to edit magazines, to gather themselves in tape recording clubs. This piece documents and poeticises their activities, that ranged from family recordings, to musique concrète, to the recording of bird songs, to the soundtracks of amateur films, to music, interviews and audio documentaries. Short electroacoustic compositions by me link or sometimes frame sound hunters’ recordings.
The tapes and cassettes of this piece have been collected thanks to the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds. Many thanks to them.
2024
