Rencontre : Les sons de la nature

A scientific and musical meeting with Jérôme Sueur, eco-acoustician, and Sébastien Gaxie, composer and musician.

Bird songs, rustling leaves, buzzing insects, amphibian calls or murmuring streams... How to listen to nature? What do its soundscapes tell us about ecosystems and their evolution? How can music capture these sonic materials to invent new forms of expression?

At the intersection of bioacoustics, ecoacoustics and musical composition, this meeting proposes to explore the links that unite science, nature, listening and creation.

Through a discussion between Jérôme Sueur, eco-acoustician, and Sébastien Gaxie, composer and musician, the forest becomes both an object of study and a territory of invention.

The meeting is punctuated by listening times inspired by or directly from the sound landscapes of the tropical forest. In partnership with Sorbonne Université About Sébastien Gaxie Sébastien Gaxie is a composer, pianist and writer.

His catalog embraces a vast field of expression, from opera to solo pieces. His music, played worldwide, has earned him numerous awards, including the Italia Prize, the Eugène Ionesco Prize and the Swiss Life Prize for 4 hands.

During a research residency conducted in 2024-2025, he explores five years of recordings made in the tropical forest of French Guiana.

Drawing on AI-assisted sound analysis tools, he explores the biophony of this ecosystem to compose a dialogue between human music and that of the living. About Jérôme Sueur Jérôme Sueur is professor at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN).

He conducts projects to monitor biodiversity through the analysis of sound landscapes, particularly forest ones.

His work, which weaves links between animal behavior, ecology and music, leads him to question the sonic dimension of nature: its composition, its evolution and its perception by living beings. He was a contributor to La Terre au carré and Le temps d'un b