Piece ‘Sound Collage: Reimagining Poème électronique’ analyse and reimagine Poème électroniqueby Edgard Varèse using contemporary approaches.
The Philips Pavilion Project and Poème électronique represent a unique convergence of architectural design, spatialised sound, and electroacoustic composition, embodying belief in humanity and the future as envisioned during the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In this project, I explore how these elements interact and how they can be reinterpreted using contemporary tools and perspectives. Poème électronique was realised through a close collaboration between architect Le Corbusier, composer Edgard Varèse, and sound engineers, culminating in an immersive multimedia experience. Varèse's composition, constructed using both electronic and concrete (recorded) sounds, was shaped spatially through a complex system of loudspeakers and magnetic tape playback. The result was a pioneering audiovisual work in which sound moved through space to generate a dynamic perceptual experience.
In reimagining this, I constructed my piece using a digital audio environment. Drawing on field recordings, digital synthesis, modulation, and spectral processing, the work reconfigures the sensory structure and spatially oriented sound design of Poème électronique within a twenty-first-century electronic music context. The structure and contained energy of Poème électronique have always fascinated me, and in this project, I focused on reproducing those energies. The seven chapters that make up the structure, ‘Creation’, ‘Spirit and Matter’, ‘From Darkness to Dawn’, ‘Gods Created by Human Hands’, ‘Thus Time Forges Civilisation’, ‘Harmony’, and ‘To Fragile Humanity’, felt like a collective memory or a mythologised timeline of sensation. Each title does not impose a specific narrative but reveals how human experience accumulates and transitions through time.
I approached this reinterpretation not merely to revisit history, but to interrogate the ideals and contradictions embedded in the technological optimism of the mid-twentieth century. Technology functions not only as an enabler of perception but also as an agent of distortion, memory inscription, and the dispersion of presence. I sought to reveal the fracture of perception, the layers of memory, and the incompleteness of humanity, using the tools and aesthetics of 21st-century electronic music and visual editing.