Music composer
The artistic route of Charles-Edouard Platel has for origin a passion for the electroacoustic composition, while he formerly exercised his engineer job. Thus, his musical cursus is based on a methodical self-leaning and capitalization of experience feedback. Today he carries out aesthetic musical projects, personally and in association with other artists, by using digital instruments that he appropriates or designs himself if need.
Born in Calais in 1946, he starts a scientific cursus at the University of Lille in 1963. That year, he get enthousiastic for a concert led by Pierre Schaeffer and bringing together the Musical Research Group and the Lasry-Baschet Sound Sculptures. So his mind and ears being open for research, experiments and new ideas, he continues studying physics, then he graduates the Master of Electronics, Electrotechnics and Automatics.
Volunteer for cultural aid in Ivory Coast in 1970-1971, he benefits of this mission to perform a lot of ethnic recordings of African music in some villages in he North of this country, particularly of balafon music.
Back to France, from 1972 to 1990 he is software project manager for several industrial companies, in the fields of acoustic signals, automation and communication. Then he widens his field of intervention to the management of the quality of the software, in project and company organizations.
In parallel, from 1983 to 1992, after a training at the Group of Experimental Music of Bourges, he set up his own musical studio for electroacoustic composition. He uses FM and analog synthesizers, phonographic captures, and practices the montage on a magnetic tape recorders bench.
From 1992, he adds to the studio a MacIntosh computer, operating as sequencer and for the montage. Then he implements a configuration enabling the video + audio montage.
During this period, his annotations taken during the composition work,
during the listening to different area musical works (jazz, minimalism,
world music, electroacoustic) and when reading some reference authors,
are recorded and synthesized in an essay, "Musique Imaginaire (Imaginary
Music)". The first version was released on his personal website in 1997.
The aim of the book is double:
- to share with others the discoveries made during his experience of
electroacoustic composition self-leaning,
- to capitalize practices and guidance for his personal approach to the
composition.
Since 2006, end of his industrial business career. From then on, music represents his main creative activity.
He updates and launches « Musique Imaginaire» as a printed book, including numerous pictures illustrative of analogies between sounds and visuals. The free access to the book through the "imagimuse" website is kept. It is daily visited by several francophone net-surfers.
Charles-Edouard Platel's list of works includes works for concerts, musics for artistic exhibitions, video sound tracks, and also several recreational of funny pieces.
His first CD album, IMAGIMUSE / 1, was launched in December 2008. IMAGIMUSE / 2 in november 2009, IMAGIMUSE / 3 - Anachronistic poems in September 2011.
Some pieces were remarked:
"Although I am interested in very different musical area, such as classical, jazz, minimalism, electronic, traditional folk musics, sound experiments, I choosed electroacoustic tools as my own musical instrument. So there is no limitation for my inspiration sources to provide new ideas, and thanks to the powerful of software, I can implement them in structured and, I hope so, clearly understandable works. By the side of creating works for concerts, from time to time I enjoy to produce small humorous or recreational pieces.
Visual experiences are often at the origin of my musical works. Starting from photography, and thanks to the acoustical work in digital studio, I create along the time an imaginary space where the landscape, object and characters are sounds.
My ideas are gathered by my book “Musique Imaginaire”. It basically settles the listener in the core of the musical process. Thus, the music should play with the listener’s ability to listen to and to concern himself. In other words and for any style, a good music gives pleasure to listeners. Definitely, more in the deep approach than in the manner, I was mostly influenced by jazz, that I consider as providing the more significant renewal in the music of our times.
My challenge is to create sounds and rhythms that set up human links as directly as possible towards listeners. No mathematics or theoretical calculations, but attempts to touch the natural feelings. Each work of mines calls for the imaginary, to lead the listener to the folded layers of his own reminiscences, memories and fantasies. But each one also has its own story that I personally lived and that I propose to discover in this site."