Francis Dhomont is a composer of Electroacoustic / Acousmatic music. The terms Electroacoustic or Electroacoustic music have been used to describe several different musical genres or techiniques. ... Look up Acousmatic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term acousmatic dates back to Pythagoras, who would lecture to students from behind a screen so that visual information would not distract them from his speech. ...

Biography

Francis Dhomont was born in Paris in 1926. He studied composition under Ginette Waldmeier, Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger. In the late 40's he intuitively discovered with magnetic wire what Pierre Schaeffer would later call musique concrète, consequently conducting solitary experiments with the musical possibilities of sound recording.

In 1963 he decided to dedicate his time to electroacoustic composition utilising natural sounds. Performances in public of his music are done using the French "diffusion" technique over multiple loudspeakers. His work consists exclusively of tape pieces using natural, or "found" sounds, exploring morphological interplay and the ambiguities between sound and the images it may create.

Dhomont's work has won many international awards including at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France), the Magisterium Prize in 1988, Prix Ars Electronica in 1992 (Linz, Austria) and others. In 1997, as the winner of the Canada Council for the Arts' Lynch-Staunton Prize, he was supported by the DAAD for a residence in Berlin. He was recently awarded a prestigious career grant by The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec . Dhomont is the editor of several electronic music journals, and has produced many radio programs for Radio-Canada and Radio-France.

Since 1978, he has divided his time between France and Québec, Canada, where he taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996.