Matéo Rousson · Sound creation

Sound as matter,
matter to build with,
matter to dream with.

Sound reaches memory before language does, at a sensory level, almost physical. My work begins there: a dialogue with sound, across composition, field recording, installation and performance.

Listen — La Salle des Reflets

Binaural · headphones required

See & Hear

︎︎︎ Designing sound space · 2025

La Salle des Reflets Room of Reflections

Sound installation for the exhibition Un Bruit de l'Extérieur by Claire Poisson, Galerie Fernand Léger, Ivry-sur-Seine

20.1 — 20 speakers + sub37 minBinaural web version

For the main piece of the exhibition, we worked directly on the visitor's state of mind: slowing down, listening.

The source material came from echography recordings of my sister during her pregnancy — a foundational work in my ongoing reflection on sound as a trigger of emotion and memory.

Enter the room — binaural↗

Performance

Live sound creation, text, singing and object manipulation — 20 min

With singer and actress Nina Besana-Mourlaas, we staged excerpts from the artist's personal notes. Between poetry and sound: Nina sings and narrates while I take control of the installation and perform live.

Performance with Nina Besana-Mourlaas
︎︎︎ Sound sculpture · 2025

Petit Grain Little Grain

Stereo sound sculpture — first shown in Un Bruit de l'Extérieur, Galerie Fernand Léger · currently exhibited at Hôtel Rochegude, Albi, with the collective La Pel

A sound character: a robot soberly built from two small speakers. From time to time a seed falls, top to bottom. Resonating through the room, it marks time like an unreliable hourglass.

Petit Grain, sound sculpture

Un gran pichon, un res pichon, un pichon tot. Un element pichon que compausa lo tot, e que rampèla qu'al delai del visible, es la vida que pren son temps.

A little grain, a little nothing, a little everything. A small element that makes up the whole, and reminds us that beyond the visible, life is taking its time.

︎︎︎ Writing & directing · 2024

Laniakea

Short fiction, 27 min — directed by Matéo Rousson & Tom Cogo · sound design, music composition, mixing · produced by Avant La Nuit and Immercif

Conceived and written in the style of a music album, Laniakea is a work of sensory storytelling. Almost silent, shot on 16 mm, the film is filled with sounds that guide us and envelop us with their presence.

Password: Lnk25

Schedule

Jul–Aug 2026 Sonne, Moor und Sterne — Lower Saxony8.1 sound installation with Kollektiv Eigenklang — workshops and live set Just finished
Until Feb 2027 SommeilStudio period — composition and research on a personal project In studio
Feb 2027 Théâtre du Châtelet, ParisLa Belle et la Bête, Philip Glass — sound spatialisation, assistant to Thierry Coduys Spatialisation
Jun 2027 Grand Palais, ParisA piece by Pascal Dusapin — sound spatialisation, assistant to Thierry Coduys Spatialisation
Jul 2027 SelvaInstallation with Camp.liure, produced by Detz Lab — commissioned by the DRAC, three-week residency Installation
Summer 2027 ProsodiaWith Manon Alla — live performance inside an installation Performance

Collectives

Work made with others, in places.
Occitan language · decolonial practice

Detz Lab

Multidisciplinary creative collective

Detz Lab works in the Occitan language. In the wake of decolonial thinking, the collective appropriates and reinvents the collective imagination through films, videos, events and shows.

In 2027 I'll create a mixed art installation with artist Camp.Liure for Selva, a project commissioned by the DRAC, produced within Detz Lab.

detz.fr ↗

Audio-visual · participatory

Kollektiv Eigenklang

Germany — founded 2017

Eigenklang builds interactive happenings where visitors take part in the work rather than consume it.

In summer 2026 we collaborated on an 8.1 sound installation for Sonne, Moor und Sterne, a cultural camping festival in Lower Saxony devoted to the moors.

kollektiv-eigenklang.com ↗

About

Sound is not just something we hear: it is a material that shapes our imagination and our bodies. It moves through space and through me, revealing its own rhythm, fragility and presence. Each sound suggests its own story, its own pulse — like little lights that shimmer in the dark.

I work across composition, field recording and performance. I sing, play instruments, compose and arrange, I mix and edit. I'm drawn to how sound can suggest an emotion, a memory — and more deeply, to how it reaches that memory before language does. When sound creates a truly intimate connection, emotional engagement becomes real and deep: deep enough to carry us further into our own sensations, into an awareness of ourselves and the world around us.

Beginning

At eight years old, alone in the living room, I put a classical music CD on the hi-fi at full volume. The experience stayed with me — that relationship to sound, physical, immediate, overwhelming.

It led to the BTS Audiovisuel in Toulouse, then to the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris, where I graduated with a Master's in Sound in 2021.

Since

Immediately after graduating I co-wrote and co-directed Laniakea, my first step as an author. Alongside it I built a professional practice in cinema sound — design and mixing for fiction, documentary and animation, with credits in films selected at Venice, Guadalajara and Visions du Réel, working alongside Ken Yasumoto, Bénédicte Schmitt and other leading figures of French sound.

Today my practice is fully dedicated to 3D sound — composition, installation and spatialisation, alongside Thierry Coduys.