INTRODUCTION

"3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" is a common project with Jason Whittle, that designed and realized the visual part.

The idea could be explained like that: We wanted to make a virtual world formed by several parts, where each part included its music. The user could be able to change the music while moving in the world. As well, he could modifye the power (lower and louder), mix the musics, or the instruments together.

So we had to solve two different kind of problems: visual and musical ones. For the visual part we had to find the best way to build the world: to choose what shapes we were going to use to put the musics in, how to put the shapes together so we can have a central point, how many shapes (so how many orchestras), how many instruments would have each orchestra, what software to use, what does the technology allow us to do...

Then, Jason had to realize the world.

For my part the job was then to compose a music and realize it (electronic, software and audio devices). The idea was also to have different orchestras playing in different styles that could be heard separately or together,so we could listen to a classical group playing with an african group, or a rock band playing with a jazz group and an indian cithar and so on.

I choose the name "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON " because I wrote a piece of music for a virtual 3D world and because that world is made of 20 tetrahedrons put together to create a shape that enters in a sphere. I have to precise that, obviously, this music is not realized in 3 dimensions. In my sense this is mainly an artistic work, a piece of music to listen to, a nice world to look at, and to navigate in. But it is also an interesting computer realisation.

It has been an interesting job for me to write a piece of music that is formed byseveral parts, when each part has to be writen in a certain style, that can be heard alone but also has to work with others, and for sure, all together. This work can also raise a question that is in a certain way almost philosophical: Does styles exist in music? What are they? Can we make them disappear and create an " universal music ", one Music?

This work is based on the traditional way of writing music: The score. I wrote it on the same principle as a symphony. But instead of writing a score with a pen,or with the mouse, I played and recorded the music straigth with a keyboard. I also recorded a saxophone, human voices and used samples of animals. As we have different orchestras, I wanted to have different languages, and also different accents from the same language: I am interested by the sound in general: it can be melodies, harmonies, rhythms, timbres, but also voices, and the proper sounds (or melodies) of languages, and accents.

The computer softwares provide many other possibilities like programming or algorythmical composition, sound synthesis, sound processing, and even if I would have liked to use all of them, 8 months were too short for me to be able to dominate all of them. "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON " is a piece of music for a virtual 3D world. It is interactive because the user will mix the instruments, moving inside the world, and this way will get different bands (of 4 instruments), so new musics, new combinations.

So, this piece is a multifacial work and has different aspects:

. musical composition and arrangement

. use of computer and electronic devices

. awakening to the question: Is there syles in music and what are they?

. first experiment of "animal music" (music played by sampled animal sounds that actually become instruments)

. use of voices as sounds, instruments, but using in the same time the difference between man and woman, the difference between 14 languages, the difference between 6 accents in one language.

This dissertation will try to comment what are my objectives with this work, but also to describe it, to explain how it is built, how we arrived to the tetrahedron (as the solution to the problem: "what shape should we use?"), how to use it, to enjoy it, will raise the question of styles in music, and will present the continuation or the possibilities of "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" in the future.