I met the Hums and Thibault Pasquier company in Avignon in July 2022. I had just attended a reading of the text of L'enfant sauvage and he was coming out of Revanche, a play in which I played and for which I composed the music.

 

The sound creation of L'Enfant Sauvage aims to make the environment with which the characters interact palpable, alive and active, and to give the viewer the opportunity for deep identification through a sensitive understanding of their perceptions and their experience.

 

During several weeks devoted to research, I built up a large bank of sounds captured by 3D and binaural microphones. My goal was to have the most real, immersive, spatialized and intimate sound broadcast possible. The music, for its part, is an additional energy partner on stage. I wanted it to blend into the sound universe in such a way that we don't always know what the characters are hearing or not.

 

From the start of the play, the audience is led to experience the hunt led by the child from the child's point of view, from the inside. One of the specificities of this writing is, in my opinion, the particular way in which the characters express in a singular way each ordeal they go through. Each experience thus takes on an individual, unique value, which draws each protagonist in his perception and his vision of the world, touching on the universal by way of the most personal. We follow their thoughts, their emotions and their metamorphosis, and the course of their audible thoughts gradually relays and supplements the voice of our own thoughts in our heads.

 

As a composer and performer, I had long been interested in psychoacoustics, the study of the difference between the sounds that reach the ears and their perception and interpretation by our brain. Thus, the sounds of the dark futuristic universe in which the protagonists evolve are never objective. They are heard by viewers through the filter of a character's perception. Its history, its psychology, its emotions, will "shape" (enlarge, reduce, transform) its reception of sound and it is this sound "from the inside" that the listeners of the public will share, and which will come to meet their personal spectrum.

 

The story of the wild child is indeed always a story of versions, of interpretations. Everyone sees in it a reflection of their projections, their fears, their deep nature, a return to themselves. Here, the social and cultural differential of the three figures (an internationally renowned scientist, a sweeper, a child who grew up alone in the primary forest) is stretched to its climax. This field of exploration makes us ask ourselves, “How do we experience the world? or even "What world are we experiencing?" This allows us to infiltrate in a sensitive way into an intuitive and universal understanding of what is the most foreign, the most different to us. The inner experience of this deep understanding is, in my opinion, our most essential duty.