Musician, composer, and musicologist, Youmna Saba takes up the relationship between electronic and electroacoustic music and the sung Arabic language. She is the laureate of this first sound residency of the musée du quai Branly, which is part of a larger project in the making, the Musée Résonnant which will be built in 2024. On the occasion of the presentation of the project from March 23 to 25 in the form of an exhibition, conference and concert, a meeting with the artist, Christine Drouin, Director of Cultural Development of the museum and Eric de Visscher, scientific advisor in charge of the prefiguration and implementation of this program to promote sound in the museum.

His project entitled La réserve des non-ditsmakes us hear the micro-sounds at work in the tower of musical instruments, a visible reserve which, in the form of a glass tower, vertically crosses all the spaces of the museum. Through the intimate listening of the sounds that are produced in real time in the storage room, by the simple vibration of the instruments, Youmna Saba wants to show us that despite their "passive state" these objects are still alive. It is a question of thinking of the instruments as spaces of resonance by creating the conditions of an attentive listening of the sound events which are at work in the reserve. She offers us a sound installation, a series of compositions, and the state of her research around three places: the tower of instruments, the plateau of collections and the music box.

Before interviewing Youmna Saba about her residency project, I think it is important that we talk together about the Resonant Museum project .
Christine Drouin : The Resonant Museum project is intended to enhance the value of this intangible heritage, particularly sounds, especially on the collections stage. A project with several entries on which Eric de Visscher accompanies us and of which the sound residences are a part.
Eric de Visscher: Several sources feed this reflection. A general reflection, that the museum is not only visual but multisensory. Indeed, one can perceive the works not only through the eyes, but also through the other senses. This obviously applies to the Quai Branly because many of the objects are already multi-sensory objects: they come from ceremonies and rituals where all the senses are called upon. Another specificity of this museum is its architecture. It is not made up of successive rooms but rather conceived as a territory where the visitor walks through spaces of very different sizes and volumes and therefore of diverse acoustics. These particular physical parameters allowed us to go a little further. Starting with the silo of instruments, which is both a work of art and a very beautiful idea, but which was not pushed to the end and which still today generates perhaps more questions than it brings answers. So I was immediately seduced by Youmna's idea of working around the silo.
There is also the question of the stage, of the collections where a few sound points are already present in certain places, but unevenly distributed and in a somewhat illustrative way, that is to say: "I show you a flute and make you hear the sound of this flute (or of another one a little equivalent according to the sources that can be found). At this stage of the reflection, the idea is first to add sources to create a more homogeneous sound context. We could talk about sound ambiance, even if it is not quite that. If we want to avoid the term "immersion", which is very overused at the moment, I would rather talk about the idea of creating a soundscape.
CD: I would like to emphasize that this Resonant Museum project involved all the museum's teams, including the curators, the cultural development and exhibition team, the technical teams and the building. We did an acoustic study to find out how this building reacts to the question of sound, as well as to noise pollution. We also conducted experiments on the perceptions of the sounds of the museum by and with the public. The funny thing is that the public has the impression of hearing sounds where there are none! This is probably due to the scenography and architecture of Jean Nouvel, which favors the imaginary dimension of certain spaces, such as the outdoor garden.

Will the visitor be able to visit the museum through different entrances, visually and through sound?
EDV: Yes, different entrances will coexist, without headphones or interactivity, but in a continuous way. Continuous does not mean that sound will be broadcast all the time and everywhere. We will have periods of silence. There will be high or low sound sources, close or far from the audience, like when walking in a street or in a forest. To which will be added the artists' views of a collection in the context of residencies.

Is it a challenge?
CD : Yes and no. Youmna's proposal has taken on the form of an exhibition. Youmna's installation is in place until December 31. But the Resonant Museum 's route will not be in place until 2024. There is no guarantee that the sound resident chosen that year will propose a visible or audible project on the collections stage. Future residents may choose to work from the museum's sound and audiovisual collections, or to integrate sounds of nature captured elsewhere. This may take the form of a performance in the theater.

Why did you choose to partner with the Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains rather than with National Centers for Musical Creation?
CD: Obviously, the selection criterion is sound and the sound experience, but there can be an opening to the visual. And with the Fresnoy, there was immediately a desire to work together.Alain Fleischer 's history with Jean Rouch also played a role in this.

Youmna, your sound installation The Unspoken Reserve takes place in the musical instrument tower and also unfolds in two other spaces: the music box and the museum stage.How did you think about and design this project?
Youmna Saba: The first time I came to 2019, I didn't notice the instrument tower. It was when I read the residency packet that I became aware of its existence, and I went back to the museum to discover it. But it is quite difficult to see what is inside, as the visitor cannot access it. I started to wonder about these instruments: what is the idea of conservation? Are they still instruments since they are not played or do they become simple objects? I built my project around this question and the intuition that there is surely something going on inside like very subtle sound phenomena. I explored this space as an ecosystem, related to conservation (temperature, humidity, light) and listening, as a natural environment by making recordings inside.
During the first visit, I approached a microphone (not very professional) near the mouthpiece of a flute and very beautiful harmonics were revealed. And I continued to proceed in the same way for three weeks. As I could not touch the instruments, nor move them, I chose very small, non-intrusive microphones to insert them very delicately and record their sounds. From this large collection of recordings, I made a pre-selection, then edited them at the Studio national des arts contemporains du Fresnoy. We created a bank of sounds that will be freely accessible as material for creation, composition, and even reflection, because many details and information are revealed to us by these recordings. Then, we have distributed three listening points on the windows of the silo so that sounds are triggered live by the visitor when he/she puts his/her hand on a small icon.

I also conceived a space in the "music box" to group together a synthesis of the main axes of this work in the tower (notes and daily questioning). I wanted this to be part of the installation, I wanted to make it all accessible.
On the screens appears a light version of the database of the 139 sounds I selected. Equipped with headphones, the visitor chooses the instrument he wants to listen to. Each recording is a trace at the moment T of the sound phenomenon which could have been recorded 6 months ago, and not the instrument itself. I even kept the interferences, like the passage of a school group for example and the change that it caused in the continuous sound. I did not want absolute silence, because I think that all this is part of the current state of these instruments and that it is important to capture that too.
On the museum set, I used these sounds to make compositions and created five listening points. These compositions are based on little stories I had while making the recordings. The first thing the curatorial team told me was that sometimes in the silo, when the carts pass by, the gongs start to move. Indeed, there is a lot of movement because of the metal boards that sometimes create a kind of gong orchestra. I recreated this phenomenon without touching the gongs. We just touched the shelf, put a little pressure and the gongs started to move and bang together. I captured that and kept it as a composition. Another one is a composition of frequencies that I had not perceived by ear, but discovered during the capture tests. When I placed my contact microphone on metal percussion instruments, I could not hear anything in the headphones. But during the post-production at Le Fresnoy, we found frequencies that were hanging around in the file; we isolated them, boosted them! And I composed with this material.

This silo contains 10,000 "inert" instruments. What, inyour words, is of the order of theinaudible and how do you proceed to reveal it?
YS: At the beginning, I didn't have access to the tower, it was a matter of imagination and I based my work on the physical fact that there is something even if it is not audible. For example, I imagined crackling material or I relied on the resonance chamber of the instruments because I knew that they would have a specific acoustic imprint.
But the first thing that surprised me when I was able to access the tower was the presence of a wind tunnel that made the sounds even more inaudible! Impossible to hear the cracking. The inaudible is also visual. When you see someone playing guitar without sound, you can imagine that there is a sound. The movement of the air in the tower, the movement of the people around the silo make that there are these resonances and it is necessary to locate them with the microphones,
EDV : I would like to add something on this question of the inaudible by using my old hat of director of museum of the music. This inaudibility of a collection of instruments is always there, we are always fighting against it, and the public also asks: "we want to hear the instruments, why don't we play them?" Or, "these are dead instruments."
Sometimes we play certain instruments, make facsimiles or recordings, but we don't do concerts. There are all kinds of perspectives depending on the type of object.
Youmna opens another way to approach the instruments.
When the visitor clicks on an instrument, he expects to hear the sound of a flute, but no, he hears something else. It's a completely original and innovative approach. Moreover, I am also very happy that with the teams, she succeeded in creating this live side because what we hear around the silo takes place in real time. And this is in addition to the recorded work. Both uses are important.

In 2020, as part of the Taïma project at the CNCM Césaré in Reims, you were accompanied by Nicolas Canot (computer music and electronic lutherie). Did this have an impact on the conception of this installation?
YS : Yes, absolutely. This project is a continuation of the research started with Nicolas to create electronics with an Oud. I had the idea to place a microphone in the instrument, to work and play with the resonance, as a musical element, whereas usually it is an obstacle. I then did a project with the Neue Vocalsolisten where I placed my Oud in front of six singers who, while singing, triggered the resonance of the instrument. I did the same experiment at the Cité de l'Architecture where I placed the Oud in one room, and myself in another, and then I triggered the feedback of the Oud with my voice. This project at the museum is a continuation of this experimentation on modulations, resonances according to an external stimulus. When I saw the instruments in the silo, I asked myself: how will they resonate when stimulated? I had a plan B to stimulate them, which was to bring in sounds from outside, but I didn't need it because there were events going on inside.

You say that you conceived this project as an invitation to the public, to a new form of listening. I would like you to try to define it?
YS: In itself it is an attentive listening, because I find that we lose that. When we listen to these sounds for the first time, we perceive at first sight continuous sounds, but in fact, there are things that happen in them and that's the interest of this listening. It's also about listening to the other, to these objects.
CD: I find that it also creates a break in a classical tour, as much as one can say that the Quai Branly tour is classical. When you read the labels, you are in the position of a normal visitor, but all of a sudden, you are caught up in a sound that forces you to change your register. It's an attentive listening, indeed, but it's also a way to dream a little, it revives us for the rest of the journey, as if to re-fuel us and create a suspension.
EDV: I don't know if it's at the level of listening or of the concept, but it does give a different meaning to this silo. We can say that symbolically, there are all the instruments of the world, all the music of the world, thus all these vibrations of the world.

Youmna, in what way does this project make the link between your research as a musicologist and your musical creation?
YS : In my musical creation, there is always a musicological research to explore different temperaments, the interactions of certain intervals, frequencies. In the Taima project I was interested in the sung Arabic language and the phonemes of this language. Phonemes are timbres that also interact with resonances. This residency project opened me to many questions. For example, about the temperament of the flutes that I discovered, I did not know that they were tuned like that; these relationships of frequencies, of sound texture, between them in the same sound. I'm looking forward to using this soundtrack in my creations because these are really sounds that you can't recreate and that are specific to this material and these objects. I'm always looking for sounds that are a bit new.

Interview by Anne-Laure Chamboissier

Photos © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, photos Julien Brachhammer
Photos © Vincent Mercier
Photos © Eric Sander