Séverine Morfin is blazing a trail with music that is attentive to nature and porous to the sounds of the world around us, building a large-scale transdisciplinary project where musical creation and ecology become one. Bringing together contemporary, traditional and jazz musicians, two researchers and a visual artist, the violist and composer orchestrates an unlikely encounter between a unique string quartet and soundtracks recorded at the Parc forestier de la Poudrerie (93). Birdsong, bat calls and toad croaks are “played” alongside instruments in an elegant, melodious and sometimes hypnotic repertoire, where everything is organically linked.

Faced with the climate crisis, what role can composers and musicians play? They can create a channel for sensitive wonder at living things in order to activate the desire to care for them. As sound specialists, we can also serve biology by making people hear species that we cannot see but which live among us. The spatialised recordings will enable staff to closely monitor the evolution of life in the park in order to better preserve species, and will provide ethologists with material for their research on biodiversity.
With CHOREME, it is almost as if we are witnessing the birth of a living organism, an entity that has a life of its own, that breathes. A beating heart.

Séverine Morfin, viola and composition
Odile Auboin, solo viola with the Ensemble Intercontemporain
Malik Ziad, guembri, mandol, leading figure in Gnawa and Chaâbi music
Guillaume Magne, guitarist with the ONJ
Céline Grangey, sound engineer and sound designer, biophony recordings

Damien Delorme: Researcher in philosophy, University of Lausanne.
Yann Tremblay: Researcher in eco-ethology at IRD, bioacoustics and research