Published on the "Portraits" page of Le Monde, this profile of Frédéric Voisin opens on the studio he then occupied at Ircam, fitted out with an unusual array of 576 miniature loudspeakers, built for a sound installation commissioned from Canadian composer Robin Minard.

Pierre Gervasoni traces an atypical path: after giving up guitar and rock music, Frédéric Voisin turned to musicology at the Sorbonne and then to ethnomusicology, discovering a calling for fieldwork during missions to the Central African Republic alongside Simha Arom, where from the late 1980s he experimented with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer among traditional musicians. The article also recalls a well-known discovery from his youth: fossils of Halitherium schinzi unearthed in the Chevreuse valley, one complete skeleton of which is now on display at the Museo di Storia Naturale in Venice.

The profile goes on to describe his arrival at Ircam as a musical assistant in 1995, his collaborations with composers and choreographers such as Jean-Luc Hervé, Myriam Gourfink and Rachid Ouramdane, and his ongoing research into artificial intelligence applied to choreographic composition and into a corpus of Inuit songs recorded by Paul-Émile Victor.

Biographical milestones cited in the article