Pianoise is a piece for specially tuned pianos that treats the instrument less as a bearer of harmony than as a calibrated noise engine. French musician, sound engineer and teacher Emmanuel Lalande begins by stripping the piano of its familiar gravitational pull toward chords and tonal centers. Each string is retuned and harmonised to yield a linear distribution of frequencies across the keyboard, so that when large swathes of keys are struck together, the result is not a stack of recognisable intervals but a dense, “noisy” mass of sound. Instead of the usual hierarchy of consonance and dissonance, the instrument offers a continuous spectrum, a kind of broadband field in which every key is another point along a carefully mapped frequency line.
Within this altered terrain, composition proceeds by subtraction. Rather than building complexity by adding more notes, Pianoise starts from the totality of the keyboard and removes material, carving out voids in the spectrum. The piece is literally “music in negative”: the missing notes become as structurally and perceptually important as the ones that are played. A handful of keys withheld from a cluster can create sudden pockets of clarity or shifting bands of resonance inside what would otherwise be undifferentiated noise. Patterns emerge not as melodies in the conventional sense, but as moving silhouettes formed by absence - gaps that let particular harmonic components breathe inside the roar.
This approach also redefines what it means to write for “harmonically rich” music. Because the full instrument produces a noisy aggregate, Pianoise calls for material that can exploit and shape that richness rather than avoid it. The piece is designed so that the pianists can operate at multiple scales: sweeping gestures across large regions of the keyboard to activate the noise field, then precise, subtractive decisions that thin, perforate or redirect it. The ear begins to tune itself to micro‑differences in density, to the way particular registers shimmer or recede as notes are withheld. Over time, the listener perceives architectures of resonance where, at first, there seemed to be only undifferentiated sound.
Realising this intricate balance between design and emergence is a formidable ensemble of pianists: Sophie Agnel, Félicie Bazelaire, Barbara Dang, Betty Hovette, Emmanuel Lalande, Arnaud Le Mindu and Nicolas Lelièvre. Their collective presence underscores the project’s dual nature as both composition and improvisational framework. Lalande’s tuning system and conceptual grid set the conditions; within them, the players bring their own instincts for touch, density and timing. Sometimes the keyboard is treated as a single, multi‑handed instrument, a continuous surface where gestures overlap; at other moments, distinct voices emerge, shading the noise with different attacks, durations and choices of what to leave out.
Lalande’s wider practice sheds light on the piece’s logic. As artistic director of the association and label PiedNu, he has long operated at the intersection of composition and improvisation, engineering and performance. Pianoise reflects that hybrid vantage point. Its premise depends on an almost scientific manipulation of tuning and frequency distribution, yet its realisation hinges on the responsiveness and imagination of improvisers. The work is rigorously conceived but not rigid: it opens a system in which players can test how far subtraction and negative space can go before the sound ceases to be noise and begins to suggest new, unexpected forms of harmony.
