Kinda Hassan
Life
Kinda Hassan is a Paris-based composer and artist who works with sound, video, crafts and software programming. She was born in Beirut, where she worked until 2013, often responding to local socio-political events.
Her art has been shown at various festivals, museums and art galleries, including the Marseille Résonance Festival (MuCEM), Propagations (GMEM), Le Mans Sonore (Biennale du Mans), Cannes, Berlinale, Oberhausen, Jihlava, Transmediale, La Maréchalerie, Mumok in Vienna, Casa Arabe in Madrid and other art spaces, festivals and platforms in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
Research
In recent years I have focused on exploring and working with expressivity in paraverbal vocal communication as well as in my electroacoustic compositional processes. Instead of expanding sonic materials, I reduced them to explore deeper potentialities.
After a master’s thesis on emotional prosody and musical expressivity, I began transposing prosodic parameters into non-human sound, using a monochord-inspired instrument called the ektara. Automating it led to the creation of the “ektara-extended”, my first performative sonic automaton.
Building on this, I explored sound’s spectromorphology, its dynamic envelopes, timbres, and micro-movements, inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s and Annette Vande Gorne’s theories. I continue to build automata that reveal “the inner life of sounds” beyond human gestures.
Education
Hassan received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in 2007 and a Master’s degree in Sound Design from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design (ESAD-TALM) in Le Mans in 2018.
She has collaborated extensively as a sound designer and composer on video, film, and performance projects.