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Launched in 2020, Ircam's Musiques-Fictions collection offers a unique literary and sound experience, combining a contemporary text with a musical creation, in an immersive broadcasting system.
Seated beneath IRCAM’s ambisonic diffusion dome—composed of 49 speakers—the listener is invited to an auditory experience that stimulates the imagination through a soundscape with extensive expressive possibilities, capable of reproducing a listening situation close to that of the real world, from grand, spectacular stages to the minutest details of intimate speech.
These Musiques-Fictions contribute to a profound renewal of the genre of radio fiction, of the Hörspiel, by going beyond the simple sound illustration of narrative or dialogue, when the image no longer acts as a screen.
These Musiques-Fictions contribute to making voices and perceptions heard, creating new spaces for collective and intimate listening and resonance, which have been lacking since the disappearance of literary salons, public reading spaces, wakes and places specific to oral literature (storytellers, griots...).
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We love cars because they give us the freedom to move around, but we hate them because they break us and our lives. The automobile is an ambivalent object, occupying our imaginations whether we like it or not, and polluting our visual and acoustic environment. The car is a source of traumatic memories (crashes and carcasses) or of family vacations.
From generation to generation, the metamorphoses of these gleaming, metallic bodies have accompanied our advancing years. Cars date.
Olivia Rosenthal, Christian Sebille, and Célie Pauthe decided to tell this intimate, social, and generational story, from the DS of the 1960s to the automated Teslas that will soon dominate our transportation. Using the listening device provided by Ircam, they have created an immersive universe composed of voices, rhythms, shocks, sounds, and memories of accidents. By weaving together words, noises, refrains, and other musical effects, they convey the complexity and richness of what binds us to the car.
Mentions
Production
Ircam - Centre Pompidou
Coproduction
GMEM - Centre national de création musicale
Biography(s)
Olivia Rosenthal
French writer, novelist, playwright and performer
Olivia Rosenthal has published a dozen stories, including "Éloge des bâtards" (Verticales, Prix Transfuge 2019), "Toutes les femmes sont des aliens" (Verticales, 2016), "Mécanismes de survie en milieu hostile" (Verticales, 2014), "Une femme sur le fil" (Verticales, 2025). She won the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Alexandre-Vialatte for "Que font les rennes après Noël?" (Verticales, 2010) and the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste for "On n'est pas là pour disparaître" (Verticales, 2007). Winner of the Villa Kujoyama in 2018, she published "Un singe à ma fenêtre", the book resulting from this three-month residency in Japan, in September 2022 (Verticales).
Performer and playwright, Olivia Rosenthal writes for the theater and takes to the stage herself to present hybrid forms with artists from all disciplines.
Performances ("Macadam animal", conceived with composer and video artist Eryck Abecassis), opera libretto ("Safety First", again with Eryck Abecassis), sound pieces, musical readings (with Bastien Lallemant, among others), performed lectures, short fiction films (with Laurent Larivière), she also makes various interventions (posters, frescoes) in the public space, all ways for her to renew and multiply the forms that literature can take.
Célie Pauthe
Stage director
Initially an assistant director (Ludovic Lagarde, Jacques Nichet, Guillaume Delaveau, Alain Ollivier, Stéphane Braunschweig), in 2001 she joined the Unité nomade de formation à la mise en scène at the CNSAD.
Célie Pauthe directs texts by Heiner Muller ("Quartett"), Thomas Bernhard ("L'Ignorant et le Fou"; "Des Arbres à abattre"), Henry James and Marguerite Duras ("La Bête dans la jungle" followed by "La Maladie de la mort"), Christine Angot ("Un Amour impossible") and Maeterlinck ("Aglavaine et Sélysette"). She presents Racine's Bérénice, accompanied by a short film by Marguerite Duras, "Césarée". Célie Pauthe has just directed Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra". For several years now, alongside her creative work, she has been teaching young actors at various French theater schools (Ensatt, Esad, Erac). She directed the Centre dramatique national Besançon Franche-Comté from 2013 to 2024.
Johannes Régnier
Computer music director
Currently, Johannes Régnier is a computer music designer at Ircam (Institut de recherche et de coordination en acoustique / musique), and a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz Institute, HHI, Vision and Imaging Technologies department. He also teaches regularly at Ircam, and occasionally at Berlin University of the Arts.
Location
75004
Paris
Ircam - Centre Pompidou (Paris)
1, place Igor-Stravinsky75004
Paris
Music Fiction — Let's go!
Olivia Rosenthal, Christian Sebille, Célie Pauthe
Immersive listening
Sat., Sept. 5, 2026 | 3:15 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.
, IRCAM — Centre Pompidou (Paris)
Admission is free
Duration
, approximately 50 min.
Distribution
Olivia Rosenthal
text and voice
Christian Sebille
music
Célie Pauthe
direction
Johannes Régnier
computer music production Ircam
Oscar Ferran
sound engineering
music recorded by
Quatuor Tana
Useful links