IMEB International Sound Archives
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The IMEB's holdings form the Fonds MISAME, whose Répertoire général — compiled by Christian Clozier — brings together 1 946 composers, 6 612 works and 63 countries, split into two phonothèques: the International Sound Archives (Phonothèque A, « Extérieure ») and the IMEB Sound Archives (Phonothèque B). This page shows the International Sound Archives — the IMEB's Phonothèque A, said « Extérieure »: electroacoustic works by outside composers, gathered by the IMEB (catalogue index 100 000).
Coverage — the edition(s) column is knowingly incomplete. The Répertoire général records a programming year for about half of the 5 828 works in this collection; the cell is left empty for the other half. An empty cell means the repertoire holds no record of a performance, not that the work was never played. Around a thousand works here are by composers who appear at no edition in our participation index either — but that index is drawn from the competition minutes, which have been fully entered only for 1973 to 1994 and are still partially processed from 1996 to 2009, so their absence is a gap in what has been read, not a statement about what happened. No competition was held in 1995 (36 editions in all, between 1973 and 2009), so no work carries that year.
The table
- the table lists the works of the International collection (Phonothèque A), grouped by composer
- the composer cell is shared across all of their works; the background alternates to separate composers and, within a composer, their pieces
- edition(s) gives the year or years in which the work was programmed at Bourges, between 1973 and 2009; the cell is left empty where the Répertoire général does not record it, and a work played again in a later edition carries several years
- a ★ after a title marks a work distinguished at the competition, held within the festival; the award year is not carried into edition(s), and a number of awarded works carry no programming year at all — the full prize list is on the Award-winning works page
Composers & works
- a composer whose name is underlined with dots has an ISNI: click the name to open their international identity record in the panel on the right — name forms, dates, external links (VIAF, Wikidata, MusicBrainz…) and contributing databases. The panel stays open while you scroll the table; close it with the cross or the Esc key. Clicking an agent closes it, since it sits over the information boxes — but the loading counter alone leaves it open
- the visualization has an ISNI record of its own, and it does not behave like the one above: click an agent whose composer has an ISNI and a box appears in the information column, between the orange box and the purple one, headed by that identifier — click the header to unfold the record. It sits in the column instead of over it, so nothing is hidden, and nothing is requested until you unfold it
- by default All works shows the whole collection on the canvas; you can also pick a country in the Country menu to filter the table and the visualization to that country's composers, pick another to switch, or come back to All works. This collection is the large one — some 4 380 works — so All works takes a moment to build; the number of agents on screen is capped either way, and each one carries several works in turn rather than standing for a single one
Agents
- on the canvas, each moving ellipse is an agent carrying one archived work
- an agent, still looking for others sharing a common property
- a grouping — click it to open it
- an opened grouping, showing its members — double-click it to close it
- a single work inside an opened grouping — click it to display its details in the information column: the orange box names the composer and their country, the purple one describes the work, and a blue box appears between them when that composer has an ISNI
Grouping
- agents compare their properties as they move; candidate properties and their exchange counts appear in the white panel of the top bar, and a property (such as name or minutes, the duration rounded to the nearest minute) becomes clickable once exchanged often enough
- click that property name to let the agents regroup around it
- reset restarts the system, pause freezes it (the p key toggles the agents' drift)
| composer | title | duration | edition(s) |
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| composer | title | duration | edition(s) |
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