This piece, written for a variable instrumentation and electronics, echoes the overwhelming presence of numbers in our digitized society. Numbers are everywhere—in the form of codes, customer IDs, card numbers, phone numbers, bank accounts… With the proliferation of digital tools and the gradual disappearance of human interaction, we are constantly confronted with a veritable mass of numbers.
In this short musical fable, numerous artificial voices—“zeros and ones, meticulously organized”—guide the progression of the narrative, shifting from one language to another, from one list to the next: clouds of numbers, sequences of numbers—ascending, descending, complex, rational, even or odd… What seems paradoxical here is that, by endlessly asking the machine to recite absurd lists of numbers, it begins to lose all logical structure, attempting instead to shape its speech to make it clearer or more poetic—which, in this context, is entirely senseless and irrelevant! The result is a kind of grotesque and startling mode of enunciation, humorously revealing the limits of what is often presented to us as intelligence...
Score excerpt
