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This companion website illustrates the book Les Cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma, archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, published by éditions mf, through a wealth of audiovisual documentary resources: film excerpts, music, images and articles.

Les Cloches d’Atlantis

Electroacoustic music and cinema

It is to the history of sound inventions in cinema that this book invites us, at the crossroads of technology, music and cinema, in the wake of the most inventive composers and film-makers. From the sound systems of silent cinema to the manipulations of sound that derive from the use of the optical track, from fiction to documentary films, from animation to experimental films, a tenuous field of convergence takes shape, in which a form of prehistory of electroacoustic music emerges.

These experiments, moreover, were not without influence on the approach of Pierre Schaeffer when he invented musique concrète and gave concrete form to his project within the GRMC and the Service de la Recherche of the ORTF, which he directed until 1975.

After the 1950s, electroacoustic music gained an ever more important place, to the point of blending entirely into the cinematic apparatus and feeding the main artistic currents of experimental cinema and auteur cinema.

A completely new way of approaching the parallel and Underground history of electroacoustic music in cinema, the outcome of more than ten years of research.

This companion website was made possible by the support of the Centre National du Livre, through a grant for the creation of a multimedia edition or an innovative digital project.