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12 – 29 March 2026
Université de MONTRÉAL
Founded on 18 October 1950, the faculty of music of the Université de Montréal is recognised as the largest French-speaking music education institution in North America. By promoting a plurality of approaches and cross-disciplinary collaboration, the Faculty offers students innovative programs and opportunities to participate in leading-edge research and outreach. It is home to several prestigious entities: the Canada Research Chair in Music and Politics; the inter-university Research and Creation Group in Music and Society (RCMS); the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT); the Spatial Immersion Research Group; and the Laboratoire Formes • Ondes (LFO).
Website: https://umontreal.ca
Presentation of the class:
Coordinator: Jérémie Martineau
The Immersive visual music workshop is a year-long course in which students develop skills in videomusic and audiovisual performance. While the first term is devoted to fixed formats, the second focuses on real time performance. Initially designed by composer Jean Piché, the course was restructured by Myriam Boucher to integrate deeper theoretical concepts, moving beyond software-centric learning to favour a multifaceted approach to visual creation—including digital and analogue capture, post-production, computer graphics, audio-reactivity, lighting, and projection mapping.
Open to all levels and programs, the course introduces students to Boucher & Piché’s (2020) typology of sound-image relationships to encourage rigorous reflection on the links between auditory and visual worlds. Throughout the year, students participate in filming sessions to produce three thematic studies (texture, form, and movement) and a large-scale final project. This program features four standout works from the Autumn 2024 term, produced under the supervision of Jérémie Martineau. These pieces are distinguished by their creative technicality and their sensitive exploration of the audiovisual bond.Immersive visual music workshop
VIDEO PROGRAMME
Resurgens | Alex BRISSON | 2024
Resurgens explores spirituality through the opposition of light and darkness. Created from video captures of light projected into water, this light transcends its physical reality to become abstract figures within an imaginary space. Through their framing, energetic unfolding, and musical compositions, these figures evoke the various stages of a process moving from destruction to the birth of a new life—themes central to the artist’s practice. In this diptych, a lost space leads to the chaos of a destructive fire, from which a glimmer is reborn. A new life manifests through floating, then eclectic gestures, like an outpouring of the spirit gradually learning its own nature.
Photocopie | Téo FARLEY | 2024
Immersed in darkness, the origin of the sole light source seems difficult to rationalize. Deprived of reference points, the viewer discovers a fragmented universe where archival family photographs and everyday objects meet. A diffuse memory whose details attempt to piece themselves back together. Through footage captured at incongruent distances, the textures of photographic paper, images dating from the author’s great-grandparents’ era, and the microscopic details of objects become autonomous worlds. The contrasts between the tangible and the blurred, vivid hues and neutral tones, unfold alongside a synthetic sound composition whose distortions and cuts are conceived in close relationship with the image. Together, these elements suggest that memories are malleable, reconstruct themselves, and may be believed as lived by an individual even if they never took place.
Vestiges | David BABIN | 2024
David Babin is a Master’s student in music, specialising in Composition and Sound Creation, at the Université de Montréal. His current research focuses on the fragmentation of natural environments and phenomena related to erosion. He uses photogrammetry and field recording as raw material, which he recomposes into synthetic landscapes. The fragments of the places he collects bear witness to a world in metamorphosis and question our relationship with nature in the digital age. His work Vestiges examines new techniques of archiving and capturing, highlighting their imperfections, their errors, and the poetry of the artifacts they generate. The artist is fascinated by the erroneous reconstructions created by memory—by what remains of memories and dreams as they begin to fade.
0 | Z. VINHEIRAS | 2025
“Ma is an immeasurable space-time where two worlds meet…” –Satsuma Odamura
Drawing on the concept of ma, 0 explores the tension between time and space, space and non-space, being and non-being, and, perhaps, the very tension of birth. Perhaps a complete cycle. 0 stems from the Japanese concept of ma, an immeasurable spatio-temporality present in our perception and, so to speak, in the universe. I approached this concept in a very physical way during butoh classes with the choreographer Denise Fujiwara, where we practised profound slowness and cyclical movement through butoh walks. During these walks, we were challenged to change speed — gradually or abruptly — from very slow to very fast. This transition, the way the body moved through space and time, could be an experience of ma. Another exercise involved imagining being pulled by the chest with a string, forwards or backwards — always in a very, very slow movement. For me, it was an intimate, deeply emotional experience, lived out in that studio. I suppose it was precisely this moment that led me to the creation of this piece.