Valentin Rocher

Valentin Rocher
Brussels-based electronic musician and sound artist.
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Climate sound

Transformations and porosity.

This work is based on the sonification of climatic data. Sounds are generated from climatic data (temperature, humidity, ice melt, etc.), converted and used as raw sound sources, textures or modulation sources to create sound patterns.

Climate change has an impact on the porosity of ecosystems. They move, expand, shrink. Move away, move closer. This modifies their interactions, creating new competitions or collaborations between them. They become more sensitive to each other, less resilient.

This project explores the concept of porosity through musical compositions, colliding digital sounds with analog sounds produced by modular synthesizers. Sound sources adapt to each other, exchange and modulate. The way in which a series of data can be transformed into a sound, texture or modulation as it passes from one environment to another reflects this permeability.

The porosity of ecosystems is thus highlighted through the transformation, the translation, of data and sounds.

By using these sounds as a basis for my compositions, I aim to create soundscapes and listening spaces that enable listeners to take another look (listen?) at these transformations and rethink their relationship to these changes.

 

Sound experiments

Improvised performance

Gameplay performance experiments. Various sounds generated from weather data are used. They are mixed with pads produced with modular synthesizers as well as field recordings taken in nature.
Although the recording is in stereo, the performance was played in quadraphonic sound. This allows for the independent distribution of sounds, in order to blend them, interact with them, and move boundaries. Clean and well-separated spaces then become less obvious, lines shift, references are lost. The sounds confront each other.
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Live performance

Precipitations

The sounds produced from precipitation data are related to recordings of rain in field recordings. In addition to this, an analog noise texture is programmed to evoke the sound of falling rain.
 

Sea surface temperature

Products are based on surface ocean temperature records. The wave pattern, which naturally emerges in this context, is replicated through analog synthesis movements, as well as through recordings of waves in field recordings. We gradually transition from one texture to another.

More about the project

This project was born after reading the 2021 IPCC report. In it, I learned that researchers and scientists were basing their research on publicly shared data records. These can be found on the Nasa website, the Giec website or the European Copernicus website.

Here, information technology makes it possible to collect, store and share information with the global scientific community. This creates a network of data, but also of researchers. They can then analyze the data and make the sad projections we all know.

I wanted to use this raw data to talk about these climatic and societal changes in a different, more sensitive way.

The interest here was twofold for my artistic work: to be able to begin integrating a more political dimension, in a non-literal way; and to explore new forms of sound creation.