Composition graduate student Luke Dzwonczyk created the music for artist Étienne Chambaud's video installation La Nuit sauve, which opened at LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut in Lille, France in October 2022.
La Nuit sauve is a video installation focusing on the animal body and the apparatuses that capture its visibility (zoo, diorama, and cinema). It has been filmed in natural history museums, various aquariums and zoos, as well as on a theatre stage where a motion control camera tirelessly follows a geometrical motif traced on the floor. The soundtrack is intermittently taken over by an orchestration algorithm that analyses and transforms the direct sounds documented in the film into a musical version played by generated symphonic instruments. As a result, a film focusing on the classification and confinement of bodies becomes a vehicle for the emergence of an ever-changing music, both classical and algorithmic.
The audio of the installation is created through a custom software program made specifically for this piece. At the core of the program is Orchidea, a tool for computer-assisted orchestration, which has been developed by CNMAT’s Carmine Cella. Here, the sounds of the film are input to Orchidea, and melodies emerge that mimic the sounds of the film. Probabilities and randomness determine the evolution of various parameters that affect the orchestration. A single instrument may play a virtuosic solo, but as time goes on this can be transformed into sparse, static chords from a brass ensemble. These decisions, such as what instruments are used, are made by the program, not by the human user.
