VIRGINIE VIEL
Composer, PhD — Photographer
About
Practice
Dr Virginie Viel is a composer of electroacoustic music and immersive sound installations, and a photographer, currently based in Bordeaux. Her work invites the listener and the viewer into a world somewhere between the known and the unknown, where memories, mental projections, symbols and physical sensations meet.
Wandering and a contemplative attention to landscape are at the root of both her photography and her music. In her acousmatic works, from stereo to multichannel, she designs immersive sound spaces and imagines how the listener moves through them over time.
Research
Her research explores the relationship between bodily perception and the sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, movement), and the ways in which sound can evoke them. At its heart lies the notion of qualia: the felt quality of a perception as it is lived from within — the grain of a texture, the sense of a distance, the impetus of a movement. The term goes back to Charles Sanders Peirce (quale, 1866) and was given its modern sense by the philosopher C. I. Lewis in Mind and the World Order (1929). In her music, qualia become compositional material: through the morphology and spatialisation of sound, she seeks to convey qualia of motion, distance, substance and energy, so that listening becomes a bodily, almost tactile experience.
She holds a PhD in Music from De Montfort University in Leicester (UK), completed in 2019 at the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, under the supervision of composers John Young and Pete Batchelor. Her thesis, Multiform visualisation: an approach to acousmatic composition, develops a composition method built on the links between visual, aural and kinaesthetic perception. This research led to composer residencies at the Université de Montréal, the Ionian University in Corfu and the Visby International Centre for Composers. She extended the method in an article published in Embodied Gestures (TU Wien Academic Press, 2022). Her publications are available on ResearchGate.
Collaborations
From 2012, she was a member of the Séneçon collective in Brussels. She has collaborated with many composers and artists on musical and audiovisual projects, from photo exhibitions and short films to live electronics and acousmatic works. Her pieces have been performed in the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Australia and Japan.
She has also explored the relationship between sound and gastronomy, drawing on her experience as a pastry chef in restaurants in Paris, Eygalières and Bordeaux. In 2023 she founded Intuitio Studio in Bordeaux, a studio that brings together sound design, photography and film.
Selected works
- The Stones can speakAcousmatic
- Nyx10:34Acousmatic
- Uni-vers(e)10:12Acousmatic
Current project
IMAGINAL REALITIES
Work in progress
Imaginal Realities questions our contemporary relationship to the world: the relation between the physical presence of a sensing, perceiving body, grounded in material reality, and the mind’s capacity to connect and to produce mental images. Made of sensations, emotions and memories, these images belong neither to the real nor to the imaginary: they form a third reality, experienced from within.
Music
The musical strand lies in the interstice between perception and memory, where lived experience meets what has never yet been perceived. It takes qualia as its material — the sensory quality of a perception as it is felt from within — and makes acousmatic listening the place where mental images emerge, drawn from memory and bodily experience.
Photography
The photographic strand approaches dwelling as an unstable experience. Through urban architecture, it questions the feeling of home, rootedness in a territory and its reverse, uprootedness: so many states through which body and mind continually readjust to the spaces they pass through.
Music and photography are two autonomous lines of research, meant to be perceived independently.
Open to collaborations
Spatial and immersive sound for concerts, festivals, exhibitions, cultural institutions and luxury houses.