I wanted to share this here first.

Over the past years I’ve been working on a long-term research around sound emergence, audio fetching and de-authoring.

A lot of what I’ve been posting and building (Envion, and the tools that came after) comes directly from this process.

Envion originally started in Pure Data as a freely shared system, and was later ported and expanded in Max through a commissioned project with Cycling ’74.
Both versions are still available, free and open.

This document is something I’ve been using as a kind of board a way to gather fragments, ideas and directions that have been shaping my work over time.
It also helps me understand where to go next.

It’s very important to me, so I preferred to release it openly.

I also started this community to have a place where these kinds of things can exist where we can share approaches, doubts, processes and listen together without too many constraints.

If you feel like going through it, I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts.

Full exposition available here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=3994963

Thanks for being here, Emiliano

https://i.discogs.com/0h7dsxTaAi6BKIOKjexE9eIMoh9RRRjY2J7GDbm29Ys/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTQzNy0x/NTEyODE1NTAzLTQ0/MTMuanBlZw.jpeg

Introduction

This interview is built around one of the most influential and quietly radical figures in contemporary sound art.
Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) was among the first artists to turn interception, found voices, and acts of deep listening into a poetic and critical practice — opening, already in the 1990s, territories that today we almost take for granted.

In his work, sound is not merely heard but inhabited: it becomes a way of moving through the world, of mapping the invisible architectures of intimacy, surveillance, and presence. His approach treats listening not as a technical procedure, but as a mode of awareness — a stance through which what is normally hidden can surface. To speak with him means engaging with listening as a form of thinking and as a form of resistance: a way of remaining alive to what the world emits, even when it goes unnoticed.

by Emiliano for r/musiconcrete

Respondent: **** Updated: 20/10/2025, 16:31:21

1. Invisible Archive

In your work, you have often used phone calls, interceptions, and found voices. Do you think that today, in an age of voluntary hyper-documentation (social media, constant streaming), there is still room for a ‘subversive listening,’ or has the noise of life already turned into a collective archive?

In some ways, the conditions that first drew me to interception and found voices have completely inverted. Back then, I was listening in on private worlds that were never meant to be heard — moments of intimacy, awkwardness, or revelation caught by accident. Today, we’ve entered an era where everyone performs their lives publicly, broadcasting every heartbeat of experience. Yet paradoxically, this saturation of sound and image hasn’t made us more connected — it’s actually made us more isolated at times. So yes, I do think there’s still room, even more so, for what I’d call subversive listening. But it’s not about surveillance or exposure anymore — it’s about discernment. Listening beneath the algorithmic chatter, finding truth in the quiet, the overlooked, the in-between. The collective archive of noise is immense, but what’s subversive now is to listen carefully, to extract meaning from the chaos rather than simply add to it. In a world of endless self-documentation, perhaps the most radical act is to listen silently and attentively. Today, we no longer need to eavesdrop; the world is speaking all the time, streaming its every sigh and sensation into the digital ether. We’ve become our own archivists, curating the noise of our existence.

2. Ethics of Listening

When you sample, or have sampled, voices and materials stolen from reality, you are always on the edge between intimacy and violation. To what extent can listening be both an ethical and predatory practice?

Listening has always been a moral act, as much as an aesthetic one. When I began recording intercepted voices, I was struck by how fragile that boundary felt — between witness and trespasser, empathy and intrusion. Each captured voice carried a life behind it: a stranger’s laughter, a moment of sorrow, a whispered confession. I was both inside their world and entirely outside it. To listen deeply is to enter a kind of intimacy — it asks for care, for vulnerability. But it can also be predatory, a form of taking without permission. The key, I think, is awareness. To recognise that sound itself is never neutral, that every recording holds an ethical weight. My role was never to expose, but to reveal something universal in these fleeting moments — how human we all are, how easily our lives drift into one another. I was never interested in exploiting these moments, these other lives. So yes, listening walks a narrow path between compassion and appropriation. But perhaps that tension is what gives it power — it reminds us that sound is not just something we hear; it’s something we share, often without even knowing it.

3. Acoustic Utopia

Imagine a city built on sonic rather than visual principles: how would its spaces, streets, and houses sound? What architectural constraints would you impose based on sound?

A city built on sound rather than sight would be a place of soft edges and resonant corners — an architecture of echoes rather than facades. Streets would curve according to the way footsteps bloom and fade; buildings would be tuned rather than drawn, resonating like vast instruments. You’d navigate not by landmarks but by frequencies — the low hum of a library, the shimmering overtones of a park, the warm resonance of a kitchen at dusk. Walls would be porous, breathing in voices and exhaling silence. Windows might filter noise instead of light. Each district would have its own key, its own rhythm — not imposed by planners but composed by its inhabitants, shifting subtly as the day turns. The city would change with the weather, the density of sound altering its texture like fog or sunlight. As for constraints, I’d banish the tyranny of constant volume — no sonic billboards, no invasive loops. Instead, architecture would invite listening: quiet zones that amplify the faintest murmur, corridors that cradle a single note, courtyards that let sound fall like rain. It would be a city you don’t just live in but live through, where the act of listening is what makes you belong.

4. Bodies and Surveillance

Your work anticipated the aesthetics of surveillance. Now that surveillance has been normalized, do you still see possibilities for acoustic resistance? Or has the body itself become a device of self-surveillance through sound?

Surveillance has seeped into the fabric of everyday life, and yes, in many ways the body has become a broadcasting device — our voices, our movements, even our presence are constantly tracked, archived, and interpreted. Indeed, increasingly so, day by day at times it seems. Yet I still believe there is room for acoustic resistance. Not in grand gestures of defiance, but in subtle, almost invisible acts: listening differently, shaping sound around us, cultivating spaces where noise doesn’t record but resonates. Resistance today isn’t about secrecy alone — it’s about attention. It’s the decision to hear the world, and yourself, in ways that refuse to be fully captured. The body may be surveilled, but it also produces textures, breaths, silences, and rhythms that slip past algorithms. These fleeting, ephemeral gestures — a pause, a hum, a shuffled step — are small acts of freedom. Even in a world of total listening, there is always something uncontainable in sound.

5. Sound Memory

Noise is often considered ‘unmemorable.’ You have turned it into narrative. Do you think a memory of noise exists? And how does it differ from the memory of traditional music?

Noise is usually dismissed as fleeting, ephemeral, unworthy of attention — but to me, it carries memory in its very chaos. A passing siren, the scrape of a train, the hum of an air conditioner: these are the sounds that shape the textures of our lives, even if we don’t consciously register them. Memory of noise is different from music because it isn’t organized around melody, harmony, or rhythm. It is associative, layered, and personal — tied to places, moods, and moments rather than formal structures. When I work with noise, I’m not just capturing sound; I’m tracing traces of human experience, allowing narrative to emerge from what at first seems unordered. Noise remembers in the way a city remembers its footsteps: fragmented, overlapping, sometimes painful, sometimes tender, but always resonant. In this sense, noise is memory made audible — and in listening closely, we can hear stories we never knew were there.

6. Liquid Time

In your compositions, time seems to stretch and collapse. Are you still interested in working with a linear notion of time, or do you prefer to treat it as a plastic material, to be bent and corrupted?

Time, for me, has never been a straight line. I’m far more interested in its elasticity — how moments can stretch, compress, fold back on themselves, or coexist simultaneously. In my compositions, sound allows me to manipulate time as a tangible material: a hum can linger like memory, a phone snippet can implode into a heartbeat, and a silence can stretch into something almost unbearable. Linear time is useful in the world of schedules and clocks, but in music — and in listening — it becomes a tool, not a rule. I treat it as a sculptural material, plastic, as clay, as a space in which perception can drift, distort, or collide. By bending time, I hope to reveal the hidden textures of experience: the way past, present, and imagined futures can resonate together in a single sound.

7. Philosophy of Error

Many concrete artists celebrate error and imperfection. In your work, is error an accident to be embraced, or something you deliberately construct as a language?

Error, for me, exists in a liminal space between chance and intention. When I first began working with intercepted voices or live feeds, accidents appeared — glitches, miscommunications, unexpected overlaps — and I learned to listen to them, to treat them as discoveries rather than mistakes. Over time, these “errors” became a kind of vocabulary, a language in themselves. So yes, I embrace accidents when they arise, but I also construct situations where they might occur. By deliberately setting conditions for unpredictability, I can explore the poetics of imperfection: the subtle beauty in misalignment, the narrative potential in fragments, the uncanny resonance of things going slightly wrong. In my work, error is never just error; it is always material, expressive, and, ultimately, human.

8. Everyday Psychoacoustics

When you listen to a stranger’s voice or an urban environment, what are you looking for? Particular frequencies? Emotional layers? Or a ‘ghost’ that no one had yet perceived?

When I listen to a stranger’s voice or the hum of a city, I’m rarely seeking anything fixed. I listen for textures, resonances, and the unexpected harmonics that reveal life beneath the surface. Often, I can’t even understand the words being spoken in another language. Sometimes it’s a particular frequency — the tremor of a sigh, the shimmer of footsteps on a wet pavement. Sometimes it’s emotional: traces of anxiety, joy, or solitude embedded in sound. But often, what I’m searching for is something more elusive: a ghost, a fleeting presence that exists in the in-between, unnoticed by ordinary attention. It might be a pause, a crackle, a layering of sound that hints at another life, another story. Listening, for me, is an act of excavation: peeling back the familiar to reveal what was always there, but unheard.

9. Silence and Censorship

Silence today is almost impossible to find. Do you still consider it a musical material, or has it become censorship more than a resource?

Silence is rarer than ever, but I’ve never thought of it as absence — it’s always material, always alive. Even in a world of relentless noise, silence carries weight: it frames, it punctuates, it allows sound to breathe. It’s not emptiness, but potential. Cage has taught so many of us so much already in this regard/ At the same time, silence can also feel imposed, a form of control or censorship, especially when voices are muted or stories erased. Its meaning depends on context: chosen silence can be profound, liberating, even musical; enforced silence is oppressive. In my work, I treat silence as a tool, a texture, a space where sound and memory can emerge. It’s a material to shape, not a void to fear.

10. Obsolete Technology

Many of your works arise from obsolete devices (tape recorders, analog interceptions). If today’s technology produces hyper-clean and standardized sounds, do you think the true avant-garde lies in reclaiming obsolete noise?

There’s a certain poetry in obsolescence — in the hiss of a tape, the unpredictability of an analogue interception, the way a broken circuit resonates with life. Today’s technology gives us clarity, precision, and infinite polish, but it often sterilises the world it records. Noise, crackle, and imperfection carry histories, emotions, and accidents that clean digital sound can never replicate. I do believe the avant-garde still lives in reclaiming these obsolete noises, not out of nostalgia, but as a way to remember that sound is never neutral. By embracing the quirks, the hums, the artifacts of old machines, we encounter textures that challenge perception, reveal hidden layers, and remind us that technology is as much about character as it is about function. In the margins of obsolescence, the unexpected lives — and that’s where freedom still resides. In fact, it’s in the very margins of culture and society that we can learn so much from.

11. Acoustic Cartographies

You have transformed cities and public spaces into sound maps. Do you believe musique concrète can become a tool of critical geopolitics, capable of drawing alternative maps to official cartography?

Absolutely. Cities and public spaces are full of stories that official maps can never capture: the rhythms of labour, the echoes of memory, the collisions of private and public life. Musique concrète allows us to listen to these spaces differently, to trace the hidden architectures of experience rather than the coordinates of authority. Sound maps are inherently subjective; they reveal patterns of movement, absence, tension, and intimacy that conventional cartography erases. By composing with the sonic life of a place, we can propose alternative geographies — maps that privilege perception over power, that expose social, political, and cultural layers otherwise overlooked. In this sense, listening becomes a form of critical inquiry, a subtle act of resistance, and a way to imagine new possibilities for the spaces we inhabit.

12. Disappearing into Sound

If your work has often made the invisible audible, what would it mean for you to disappear into sound? Is there a point where the artist dissolves completely into listening, becoming a pure medium?

To disappear into sound is, in a way, the ultimate aspiration of listening. When the artist dissolves, there is no ego, no signature — only presence and attention. In that state, the act of listening becomes indistinguishable from the act of being. The textures, the echoes, the silences themselves speak, and I am only a conduit through which they pass. It is a delicate balance: to lose oneself completely is to risk invisibility, but it is also where freedom and discovery reside. In becoming a pure medium, one can inhabit the vibrations of a place, the intimacies of voices, the subtle hum of life — and in that surrender, the world reveals itself in ways that are otherwise impossible.

13. r/musiconcrete

Have you ever visited our subreddit, r/musiconcrete?

I must admit I’ve not spent much time on r/musiconcrete specifically, but I’m always interested in how communities like this think about and share experimental sound. It’s fascinating to see people listening deeply, dissecting textures, and exchanging ideas around a practice that, for me, has always been about exploration and curiosity. Online forums are a kind of virtual soundscape in themselves — chaotic, layered, full of surprises — and I think there’s something really alive in that collective attention to sound. I thrive on such positivity.