Natacha Nisic, at the request of Pierre Thévenin and Tibault Mechler, produced the sound piece “Music for the Court” during the international symposium “Law, Sound and Listening” which they organised at Sciences Po on 19 and 20 June 2025.
Natacha Nisic formed choirs made up of people present at the various panels that took place in succession. Each piece thus consists of a montage made up of fragments of a speaker’s remarks at the symposium and fragments of the choir. A score is therefore composed of extracts of key words chosen by the artist, from texts forming a poetic text to be read to the choir.
Chorus 1 – Alexandre Vincent (Université Lumière Lyon 2) “Echos of Roman Justice : Hearing out trials in Rome Through space and words. Boris Barnabé (Université Paris-saclay) “Justice, Silence & Noise”. Pierre Thévenin (ENS Paris saclay / Ircam, “Law-Text Texts. Sounds and the Parlance of the Law”.
Chorus 2 – James E. K. Parker (Melbourne Law School) “What Wake Words Do: On the Jurisprudence of Machine Listening”. Sarah Ramshaw (University of Victoria) “Attunment of the “Other” in Law and Music.
Chorus 3 – Thibault Mechler(École de droit de l’université de Sciences Po Paris), sémiotics of Procedural Listening”. Julia Chryssostalis (University of Westminster Law School) “Hearing as Judicial Faculty”. Maria Paola Mittica (Universita degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo) “Beyond Acoustics: Sensibility and law”.
Chorus 4 – Suzan Schuppli (Goldsmiths University of London) “Evidential Soundings”. Sound artist Joel stern (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and poet Franck Lebovici.