On 18 October 2020, invited by the ON — Octobre Numérique festival in Arles to take part in an augmented cruise on the Rhône, I installed this new harp on the roof of the barge L’Abeille Noire, carrying an audience downstream from Vallabrègue to Tarascon.

The experience offered a headphone-based listening session combining the field recording of the journey — capturing the natural environment with a stereo pair of microphones — and the amplified sound of the harp.

The wind turbine operated as a synesthetic antenna, revealing the direct relationship between wind and sound on the river and heightening the perception of its influence on the surrounding environment.

The experience unveiled the visible dimension of the wind, transforming the landscape like a slow cinematic tracking shot. The sound of the harp, combined with the dance of the vegetation along the riverbanks and the rippling movement of the water, immersed our perception of reality in an almost fictional contemplation, full of poetry.

This harp was exhibited in an exceptional wind corridor on the forecourt of the CEA (Grenoble Atomic Energy Research Centre), just a few steps from the Isère River.

Reclining in lounge chairs while listening to the harp, the audience was invited to contemplate the shifting light of the cloud-filled sky while feeling the wind blowing across their bodies. The experience offered an augmented reading of the landscape, where light and Aeolian songs transformed a modern architecture surrounded by its Alpine crown, through a powerful sound system that made the surrounding space vibrate.

This harp, installed on the roof of a building, offered the public a three-part listening experience. The first, acoustic, was accessible to visitors standing below the instrument. The second, amplified, took place about thirty metres away, where the audience was invited to relax on lounge chairs arranged beneath a fig tree, facing the harp. Behind them, five loudspeakers and a subwoofer simultaneously diffused both the sound of the harp and the surrounding bioacoustic environment captured by two electret microphones, immersing this area in Aeolian melodies whose intensity evolved with the strength of the wind.

The third listening experience consisted of the live audio stream, which visitors were invited to connect to as they wandered through the site where the other artworks were presented. The installation thus invited the audience to experience the movement of air through multiple modes of listening to the same soundscape, from different locations and at varying distances across a single site.

Starting at the Montgreleix Calvary, visitors walk for 20 minutes from the base of Lagarde Hill to its summit at an elevation of 1,300 meters, where they are treated to a 360° view of the entire Auvergne region. As visitors ascend toward this “roof of the world,” the installation gradually reveals itself first to their eyes, then to their ears.

Nine 4-meter-tall wind harps form a mystical circle with a circumference of 100 meters, within which visitors come to listen to the music of the wind blowing over Mont Cezalier.

Amid the cows, birds, and insects that inhabit these places, the sound produced by the installation blends with the bioacoustic environment to set the entire landscape vibrating and create a unified work of art. The wind-harp melodies synchronize with the dance of the vegetation and the drift of the clouds. We feel the wind blowing over us; we listen, we watch, and we become one with the landscape in the extraordinary synesthetic and polyphonic experience offered by this large-scale land art installation.