"Wishing to create music, I first choosed my instrument: the electroacoustic sound".
Lille, at the end of 1963: I discover electronic music at a concert led by Pierre Schaeffer and bringing together the Groupe de Recherche Musicale and the Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet. At the time, as a young student studying general physics, then electronics, I was also interested as listener in the pioneers of European and American musical innovation in the fields of contemporary music and jazz.
Then, as a volunteer in Côte d'Ivoire in 1970-1971, I take advantage of this mission to make recordings of traditional African music in the villages of the north of the country, in particular of balafon players. The passion was born and will continue to develop over the years.
Back in France, working in software engineering, and specifically for several big industrial projects focused on digital processing of acoustic signals. Thus my musical itinerary started from my desire of artistic creation while taking advantage of the knowledge of my profession, as a woodworker could become a sculptor.
After a training course at the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges, I build a personal electroacoustic analogic studio and make my first compositions. I use analogue and FM synthesizers, phonographic capture and practice editing on a magnetic recorders bench of sounds recorded tapes, cut and pasted by small pieces.
RSF Kobol synthesizer from 1980, , bench of three tape recorders, vocoder, microphone : first steps in an exploration...
Then the digital-audio home studio allowed me to be more precise, if necessary to design my sound work tools and also to integrate the video image with the composition.
Sonogram of "Sailing" and multitrack window of "Metamorphosonic"
In 2006, music becomes my main activity. Beyond the wish to contribute to today's musical creation, I wish to share this music with an audience not used to or not very receptive to the contemporary or acousmatic repertoire. After hesitating about the choice of style, I have finally developed my own method to guide my research and my realisations in the ocean of musical artistic potential.
Studying the listening process, mine and that of my future listeners, seemed to me to be a good guiding thread, because the multiple facets of hearing call for multidisciplinary points of view, scientific, aesthetic and ontological. In 2007, initializing my roadmap by synthesizing my knowledge at the time, I published at the author’s expense my essay "Imaginary music, listening, analysing, creating, composing 21st century music", identifying in particular a connection between sound and visual perceptions, as well as a CD album of my first works, with some rather encouraging returns, including those of the IMEB at Bourges and Musica Nova at Prague.
On the way I get involved in projects in association with other artists: painters, sculptors, photographers, plastic artists, choreographers, poets. Beyond formal analogies, such cooperation gives me a wonderful opportunity to capture the imagination of another creator almost silently and without words, and then, guided by his/her art, to transpose his/her visions into music, which in turn inspires him/her. From 2009, I am a member of Hélium, a collective of artistic actions in the Chevreuse valley, near Paris.
Thus I regularly offer the public dates for concerts and screenings during cultural events. Offering the audience to concentrate on their own perception of sounds, I often play my music in a space where there are works of art that inspired the musical composition. Several pieces can also be continuously streamed, integrated by artists who wish to do so for their exhibitions.
My production takes the form of a catalogue of some fifty musical and audiovisual works, designed to be played in spatialized electroacoustic concerts, but also available for streaming or downloading. I produced eleven CD-DVD albums, quoted on the occasion of their release by the producers of the radio programs "Electromania", "Epsilonia", "Song of Praise". Thanks to these passers, as well as to the musical company MOTUS, performing my works on acousmonium during the Festivals "Futura" 2010, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2023 and 2025, "En chair et en son" in 2015 and in 2022, and in Paris in 2016.
The challenge for me is not to fulfill the music with my feelings, but to produce music where the listener finds a space to make his feelings resonate inside. Each of my works appeals to the imagination to take each listener into the folds of his own evocations, memories and fantasies. But each one also has its own story, which I personally lived and which I propose to discover on this site."
C.E. Platel, 2026
