Born in 1957 (Canada), I began my musical training at the age of five with the legendary Canadian organist, Louis Dubé. He can be heard on Les disques SRC (Radio-Canada recordings). My attraction for the guitar came much later in my teens (Led Zeppelin syndrome). Not been able to find a decent guitar teacher in my native town, apart a good friend who gave me some basics instructions, I became a self-taught guitarist. After studying Sciences and Psychology in college, I began teaching classical guitar before joining a private school of music where I taught for nearly twenty years.

In 2001, I went back to school and since than, I obtained my B.A. and my M.A. in History. In September of 2005, I have undertaken my Ph.D. Even if I don't have time to teach (and play) guitar anymore, I am still the privileged dedicatee, as well as my beloved wife the violinist/cellist Johanne Ricard, of the following friends-composers: Ulf Dalnäs (ed. Gerhmans); Valery Maslov (ed. Архивариус; Pasquale Massimo Romanelli (ed. Agenda Edizioni Musicali); Jônatas Batista-Netõ (ed. Doberman-Yppan) and from my dear musical friend Uwe Warneke. But my main interest has always been composition and lately, strongly encouraged by those fine friends, I have begun composing soundscapes with what I call "structures sonores".

While discovering at the age of fourteen, more than thirty five years ago, the electronic and concrete universes of Babbitt, Mathews , Stockhausen, Ussachevsky, Varèse, Xénakis among others (Carlos, Kraftwerk, Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Tomita et alii), I have been experimenting with sound manipulations and synthesis ever since. Back in the analogic era (not so far ago), I have used modular synthesizers (Moog & Korg) with tape recorders (Revox & Sony) for sound manipulations. But today, in our numeric age, the possibilities offer by personal computer permit us to do similar works at home with sophisticated softwares, liberating us of some of the technical limitations of yesterdays. For the past two years, I have been working on the soundscape of Uwe's and Margriet Verbeek's ballet: TVbeat. My ever changing virtual studio is composed of the programs listed below (and some others). Hope you will enjoy!

Here are four sound structures that I have realised recently:

Étude sinusoïdale

this sound structure was done with Audacity. It consists of a white noise modified through two VST sound effects (wahwah and flanger). It consists of a simple sound manipulation. It is with the collage of such sound object that I elaborate more complex sound structure. The objective of this experiment was to obtain an oscillating-swirling sound with a descending tone. I you listen carefully, you will hear both effects.

Klavierstücke 1

this piece by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is a re:composition". This 1954 recording by Ellen Corver (piano) comes from the composer's website. The stereo mp3 had been divided in two mono tracks using Audacity. The right channel has been processed through a VST phaser and the left channel through a VST delay. Thereafter, the two tracks have been recombined to one stereo track with Audacity. The electronic heard behind is all synthesis sounds done with CSound. I use the .orc and .sco files of Dr. Richard Boulanger with Cecilia and Sympheo front-ends. Afterward, the tracks (remixed piano and CSound synthesis) have been mixed together using Kristal with a little bit of reverb from the onboard native effect. This is my 2004 interpretation of the first Stockhausen's piece I learned back in 1974. This composition is 50 years old and has no wrinkles. This remixed is an experiment not intended for public hearing. It is a kind of musical homework.

Bis – Collage#1

this piece was entirely done with CsoundVST. So, no other softwares were used for the production of this ambience piece. The starting material of this piece is the Lindenmayer Python script included in the example file of Csoud5/CsoundVST program compiled by Michael Gogins. I have use GNU Octave 2.1.50 (computation software) to elaborate an algorithm to compute all the data "backward". It would have been easier to use Audacity with the reverse mode but I want to understand how Csound works and this elaborated exercise is the result. Again, it is not a finite piece but merely and attempt to use Csound. Collage#1 consists of 21 «skruntskrunts» of 1.40 minute each. These sound structures come from Abram Hindle's Bird Trapped in a Vector Field. All the manipulations have been done exclusively with Audacity and the native effects.

Stock's & Sons

this is another "re:composition" but this time I have used three pieces to build this structure. The first one is Sezopen taken from Markus Stockhausen CD Karta (ECM Records); the second is Simon Stockhausen's Jerusalem (live in Paris), taken from his Web site and finally Karlheinz Stockhausen Study n° 2, taken from an old LP (Deutsche Grammophon). All the treatments were done with Audacity and Kristal.