Michäel Boumendil
Michaël Boumendil is a French composer and sound designer. In the early 1990s, he conceptualized the principle of sonic branding and in 1995 created a music production and sonic branding agency, Sixième Son, which became the international reference.
What is the vision that you pursue through your work?
For a reason that has never been fully clarified, I was born with a special relationship to sound and music. I first had the intuition, then the feeling and finally the certainty that music and sound were the most powerful and engaging language – and that it was my language. I was 19 when I understood that the magic of music could be applied in a revolutionary way in the world, and that the world of brands could change the world. This has been the whole meaning of my work since the beginning. I know that if we approach sound with rigor and truth, if we build it as an element of incarnation and experience, then we can make the world more beautiful, brands stronger and therefore experiences more interesting.
What cultural or historical roots, or what other disciplines or areas of society, have most influenced your profession, in your opinion?
I belong to a family history where each generation was born in a different country – or even continent. I was born in France, I live in the United States. I am attached to these two countries. I owe a lot to France. It invented many concepts that have shaped me. I believe in the universalism of human rights, as well as in elegance and refinement of detail. French luxury is a celebration of the extreme attention that things – like people – deserve. My African roots resonate in me on a daily basis, my oriental roots too. I have a radicalism that is nourished by the journey of my ancestors and my education in the public schools of the French Republic. I get by in 5 or 6 languages and each one fills me with emotion, even if I regret not knowing more. They all speak to me even if I am very far from speaking them all.
What are the main changes you have observed in your profession over time, and what challenges might arise in the coming decades? How do they reflect societal and technological transformations?
The world of music is among those that have experienced the most recent revolutions: technical, technological, scientific, cultural, social, political, financial, in less than a century, everything has changed in music while our ears have remained the same. The most spectacular revolution is ultimately the place of music in our lives and in our societies. Music was a bourgeois entertainment, expensive, reserved for an urban elite, and whose listening was limited to rare moments. Today it is free, and everyone, all the time listens to a diversity of music that the world has never managed to bring together so widely. The power of words is collapsing, the reliability of images is disappearing. Music is becoming a superpower like no other. It offers each of us - as well as brands - tremendous opportunities to multiply our chances of success, provided we know how to go about it. I devote my latest book to it.
Is there a book, a film, or a work of art that you feel perfectly captures the essence or dilemmas of your profession?
There are three artists who have brutally touched and influenced me. Oddly enough, they are on the side of painting: Rothko, Picasso, Basquiat. I am not sure I can find a common point between them, but they speak to me and teach me things. One of my great torments is the love and fight for simplicity. I believe in simplicity but not in simplism. I fight to find the frontier and to remain on the good side of things: the one that mixes purpose with accessibility. I believe in the transformation of reality as well as the inspiration that reality offers to the truth of language. I find that all three are transformists to a certain extent. I believe that I am one, very humbly. There is not one particular piece of music that better translates the essence of my work than my last one or perhaps my next one. And yet, thousands of musical works, from Chopin to the Beatles, from Britney Spears to Billie Holiday, from Fauret to Travis Scott have helped me build the palette I’m gravitating around.
Imagine you could create a capsule that would travel through the universe and time, what would you like to put in it?
I love the idea. I’m not sure it’s a quality, but I’m not attached to objects. Even the objects I care about, I know how to let go of when I have to. I’m only really attached to love – and therefore to people. So, I’ll put the people I love and a guitar. It’s a bit like taking all the best gastronomic ingredients in the world and a bottle of olive oil. My capsule would be my Noah’s Ark, Boumendil tribe version, and we would sing around a fire, guitar in hand, for the eternity.