Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The soundtrack of our lives at Le Royal Monceau

With a flurry of top class hotel openings currently taking place in Paris, each owner is looking for something a little bit different to help their establishment stand out from the crowd. At the newly redesigned (by the inevitable Philippe Starck) Royal Monceau hotel, the management have asked the sound designers at New York based Soundwalk to compose a 24-hour audio environment.

Soundwalk have created specific, exclusive soundtracks for Le Royal Monceau's different public spaces: Le Bar Long, Le Grand Salon, the Cinéma des Lumières (the first cinema ever installed in a Paris luxury hotel), the La Cuisine restaurant and the lifts.

Built around jazz and caberet music, snatches of sound interludes and clips from legendary French films, the creators have seemingly aimed for a 1920s and 30s vibe. According to Soundwalk, this is “in tune with the spirit of a hotel designed by Philippe Starck as a "mental space" conducive to fertile encounters and surprises”.

Will a carefully designed sound environment change the way that people interact with the hotel they are staying at or eating in? Perhaps the best people to ask would be the members of staff who will have to experience the recordings on loop day after day!

To listen to extracts of these environments, visit the Soundwalk website.


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