« Le bruit de la langue »

The sound of the tongue

A two-voice performance inspired by babbling and the "sound of the tongue", with artist Camille Llobet and opera singer Magali Léger
Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 8pm

Invited by Art Genève Musique, Biennale Son presents Le bruit de la langue, a performance by Camille Llobet, as part of WOLFTONE ASSOCIATES (or LES ASSOCIÉS DU SON LOUP), a new series of performances and musical installations at Geneva's Grand Théâtre.

What makes language? Using her daughter's first babbles as a starting point, Camille Llobet and soprano Magali Léger explore prosody (inflection, tonality, accent of the spoken voice) beyond meaning, between reading and singing.

This performance is an extension of an ongoing reflection on the meaning of the sound of oral language. When we speak, the words expressed sometimes have less meaning than the sound of the voice, which accelerates, slows down, reproduces the intonation of the speaker, stops abruptly, presses on a syllable or softens.Headphones on, face to face, eyes closed, Magali Léger and I listen in a loop to a series of significant and extremely short extracts from one of our conversations, previously recorded. Live, with our mouths, we reproduce our respective words in sound, like a child experimenting with the contours of the tongue. We had a lot of fun with this intuitive noisemaking game. Our fascination with noise is perhaps linked to the child's primitive experience. He discovers his environment by touching it, and reproduces the sound of his gestures with his mouth. He plays with the possibilities of his phonatory apparatus and the resonance of his voice in space. Little by little, mouth sounds are transformed into a series of syllables and become language.