Retracing the story of Bourges’s Institute of Electroacoustic Music through exploratory programming and live visualizations

Florent Di Bartolo / France

UPEM

Paper

http://webodrome.fr/

Bourges’s Institute of Electroacoustic Music (IMEB) has been cre- ated in France in 1970 by the composers Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier who directed it until its closure in 2011. During its forty years of existence this institute has been heavily involved in the development of electroacoustic music both on national and international scales. Its activities have included among others mu- sical research, development of music-making software, creation of instruments and organization of music festivals and competitions.

From 2005 to 2011, this Institute has donated all of its archives to the National Library of France that is to say a complete set of multimedia data about the history of electroacoustic music and its worldwide diffusion. In this paper will be describing the work that has been done to retrace the story of the international competitions organized by the IMEB using interactive data visualizations and multi-agent systems (MAS) that have been modeled based on the study of living organisms’ behavior. The use of MAS will be presented as a way of exploring wide set of cultural data and retrieve new information stored in a database from the study of click streams.