Laetitia Sonami: Ideas & Machines

Laetitia Sonami, composer, sound installation artist, and technologist, discusses her forty-year musical trajectories and encounters.

Sonami has studied with Eliane Radigue, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Joel Chadabe. She moved from France to the U.S. in the late seventies to pursue her interest in electronic music, away from the more conservative French institutions of the time.

After several years performing with home-made electronics and spoken words, she started developing the "lady's glove" in 1991, an elegant elbow-length glove studded with thirty sensors that track her motions to control audio synthesis in real-time. This became her sole instrument for more than 25 years. She recently put it aside and developed the "Spring Spyre", a mysterious looking iron wheel using neural networks developed by Rebecca Fiebrink (Wekinator) that allow for a more improvisatory approach to performance. Sonami's work has been grounded in the development of compositional tools for live performance, focusing on presence and participation. She seldom records or documents her work.