Philippe Manoury on Real-Time Music and Spatialization

In a series of interviews with Omer Corlaix and Jean-Guillaume Lebrun, composer Philippe Manoury explores the relationship between writing and listening in contemporary music. He addresses the challenge of creating and developing sound forms in space, noting that it is far more difficult for the human ear to identify such forms than to retain a melody. Manoury draws on insights from the physics of listening and neuroscience, contrasting human inconstant hearing with the absolute hearing of canines and felines. He emphasizes that hearing is not the same as listening. The problem of hearing what an instrumentalist plays is compounded by varying acoustics within a space. Manoury, who has contributed significantly to the development of spatialization, presents it as a central concept linked to real-time processes that integrate interpretation into electronic music. The interviews cover artistic, anthropological, and scientific stakes of technological developments in contemporary music. The book is published by Musica falsa.