Installation

July 2-4, 2026

Espace LFO, room B-325 Faculté de musique, Université de Montréal

Thomas Augustin - Polyphonie fantôme – Listening to tinnitus in a new perspective for a transformation of its experience, audiovisual installation

Polyphonie fantôme is an installation (15:00) for polystyrene panels, mirror paper, projections and sound exciters. It is part of a research-creation project that examines the impact that sound creation can have on the processes of accepting the tinnitus condition. The project aims, through an artistic, sensitive, and critical reinterpretation of the difficult experience of tinnitus, to elicit positive affective associations that could change the perception of phantom sounds, a key process in their acceptance by the tinnitus sufferer. It musicalizes and visualizes tinnitus sounds with synthesis devices that make manifest the richness of these sonic objects, transposing the individual tinnitus singularity into a shared experience.

Sound is diffused and spatialized by a series of exciters fixed on vertically hanged polystyrene panels of various dimensions. Tinnitus generators (Max/MSP modules) that render different timbre of tinnitus sounds and a variety in its morphology1 feed the sound exciters.

Reflexive paper sheets (Mylar) are fixed on the panels, and generative noise is projected on the surfaces. The reflections are rear projected on screens of various sizes arranged in the space. The vibration of the materials creates musical moving pictures that I call “tinnitus portraits”, resembling neurological activity and nerve impulses and bringing us inside a body, in a posture of interiority. A guiding voice, in a kind of sonic meditation, invites us to imagine various sensory experiences. It evokes the “outside”, rendering the installation space with ambiguous boundaries, reflecting the malleable relationship of the tinnitus with a suggested exterior soundscape.

-- Thomas Augustin is a musician, songwriter, producer and arranger who has been active in the Quebec and international music scene for over 20 years. Hearing health has always been central to his concerns as a musician, a "situated" auditory being with a perspective different from that of others, considering the nature of hearing as a spectrum of diverse experiences. A candidate for a master’s degree in Composition et création sonore at Université de Montréal, he is specifically interested in tinnitus and is pursuing a reflection on the subjective process of auditory degeneration through sound installation works.