Can you recognise the greatest voices of Montreux Jazz Festival? For this workshop, Julie Semoroz worked in collaboration with musicologist Charlotte Graber and Alain Dufaux,operational director at EPFL Metamedia Center. Together they went through MJF’s archives and made a selection of some of the greatest voices that made Montreux vibrate over the years. The public is invited to feel and try and recognise those voices during a sound and vibration blind-test: each participant will receive a transducer (vibrating speaker), with which to feel through various parts of their body the vibrations induced by the music and vocalisations. During the workshop, Prof Didier Grandjean will introduce his research on bodily vibrations and emotional vocalisations to the public.

Julie Semoroz is singer, sound artist and head of artistic projects. Semoroz shapes sound using several sources such as field recordings, live microphones and her own voice with software and hardware. She offers sound pieces like inner journeys into the subconscious that penetrate into the darkness. Her work focuses on people’s individual relationship with mechanical and organic time. Her creations address new technologies and our post-industrial consumerist society. In her ecology-based research, in the sense of “habitat”, Julie Semoroz raises the question of how to experience our bodies and lives in the society.