Youmna Saba

The idea of an instrument vibrating when subjected to a sound source is at the base of my research in sound and composition in the past few years. I recently completed a project, “La Réserve des Non-Dits” (the storage of the unspoken), at the Quai Branly museum in Paris, that aimed at capturing the sounds of their collection of musical instruments in their passive state: meaning, the sounds that these instruments are emitting by being placed in the storage; the resonances they produce sympathetically.

It all started after I visited the museum and was struck by the six-story tower, with around 9000 instruments from all over the world; instruments that are barely visible, shielded behind tinted glass, showing only to those who take the time to stop and look.

As a musician, I felt great enthusiasm at first, then a lack of breath, before frustration settled in. Can an instrument express anything when it has been dislocated, isolated and silenced?

I embarked on a 6-month long journey of exploration that focused on looking for and capturing the sounds of these instruments. I was very much surprised to find that these instruments despite their state, are still resonating and interacting with the surrounding sounds in the museum, just as I speculated, looking at them from afar. I documented these sounds and created a sound library of 139 sounds, that are now under a creative commons license, and put together an installation that is now on view at the museum and that transmits the sounds of some selected instruments, live in the museum, thanks to microphones placed inside the instruments and speakers placed outside the tower.

This project was my way to engage with the possibilities of sound as a portal to unaccessible narratives, transforming the tower’s glass shield into a porous layer that invites the viewer into a presence that is beyond the physical appearance: seemingly dormant objects hold a lot of information in their matter, shape and placement, despite being silenced and deprived of their function, by isolation and extrapolations.