Jean-Francois Charles

During the Thanksgiving break, I watched on PBS the whole Soundbreaking series. This great show, subtitled Stories From The Cutting Edge Of Recorded Music , sheds light on the process of record and music making, through eight episodes: The Art of Recording Painting with Sound The Human Instrument Going Electric Four on the Floor The World is Yours Sound and Vision I Am My Music Here is the official trailer: Precisions about the Talk Box I found just one piece of incorrect information in the series, when the great Ben Harper describes how the Talk Box works. I have been teaching a course called The Spectral Nature of Sound at the University of Iowa, and I love to introduce the students to the Talkbox before studying other voice-processing machines such as the analog vocoder, the phase vocoder, a.o. In the episode about Voice, the Human Instrument , Ben Harper shows a great Roger Troutman excerpt, and says that the box sends electrical current down the throat of th...

Coming soon! A new soundtrack to Dziga Vertov 's movie The Eleventh Year . A collective project with musicians Nicolas Sidoroff, Clélia Bobichon, Guillaume Hamet, Krystian Sarrau, and Sébastien Sauvage. Here is a picture of our creation studio during the summer of 2015:

LOUi is the Laptop Orchestra at the University of Iowa . Our ensemble is actually more than a laptop orchestra: the students explore and develop musical links between acoustics & electronics, using instruments such as laptops, analog synthesizers, acoustic and amplified instruments. Here are excerpts from a jam with dancer, choreographer, and rapper Jhe Russel:

EPX, a video game studio, is a great student organization at the University of Iowa: a real art-technology project, gathering motivated and talented students. It was a treat to be their guest, and to listen to Jon Lonngren, developer of the boardgame Fallen Land . He presented his epic game, as well as the epic development process!