IMEB International Sound Archives

The IMEB's holdings form the Fonds MISAME. Its Répertoire général, compiled by Christian Clozier, brings together 1 932 composers, 6 563 works and 64 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 under catalogue index 100 000.

The competition column is knowingly incomplete. The Répertoire général records a competition year for 3 586 of the 5 801 works in this collection, and the cell is left empty for the others. An empty cell means the repertoire holds no record of an entry, not that the work was never entered. 629 works here are by composers who appear at no edition in our participation index either. 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, so no work carries that year, and the festival column is the one to read for that edition. That column is incomplete in the same way and names 2 164 works.

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, and the cross or the Esc key closes it.
• 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 holds 5 801 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 and pause freezes it. The space bar does the same as pause.