Jean Piché (born 1951 in

Trois-Rivières Trois-Rivières (, ; ) is a city in the Mauricie administrative region of Quebec, Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Saint-Maurice River, Saint-Maurice and Saint Lawrence River, Saint Lawrence rivers, on the north shore of the Sain ...

, Quebec) is a Canadian composer and video artist. Piché studied electroacoustic and computer music at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a Public university, public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, British Columbia, Surrey, and ...

with

Barry Truax Barry Truax (born 1947) is a Canadian composer who specializes in real-time implementations of granular synthesis, often of sampled sounds, and soundscapes. He is credited with developing the first ever implementation of real-time granular s ...

and at the

Institute of Sonology The Institute of Sonology is an education and research center for electronic and computer music based at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in the Netherlands. Background The institute was founded at Utrecht University in 1960 as the Studio fo ...

in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. He has taught electroacoustic composition in the Faculty of Music at the

University of Montreal A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

since 1988. Since the early 1990s, Piché has focused on the creation of hybrid compositions involving abstract moving images which he calls "videomusic". As a software developer, Piché is the author of a

Csound Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is named Csound because it is written in the language C, in contrast to some of its predecessors. It is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Les ...

frontend called Cecilia, and the Tam Tam suite for the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO computer. Though Piché has worked in multi-channel environments, his focus resides in "expanding" sound boundaries by using video. Piché's students are known to explore

visual space Visual space is the experience of space by an aware observer. It is the subjective counterpart of the space of physical objects. There is a long history in philosophy, and later psychology of writings describing visual space, and its relationsh ...

(visual sound in space) through

sound installations Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary time-based medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBell ...

. These types of performance installations often consist of re-configurable walls, 3D, movable objects, and other structures. Frustrated by the "bounds" of the screen, Piché attempted to "multiply" screens to expand the "space" of the image. In doing so, Piché attempted to produce individual experiences in each extended screen.

External links

Biography
on the Canadian Music Centre website.
Biography and programme notes
on CIRMMT website for 3 December 2008 concert at McGill University in Montréal. 1951 births Canadian composers Canadian male composers Electroacoustic music composers Living people {{electronic-musician-stub