About

Nicolas Bernier is an artist, producer and professor of composition and sonic arts at Université de Montréal.

Recipient of over twenty distinctions in prestigious competitions in both music and contemporary art, his work frequencies (a) earned him the Golden Nica in 2013 from Ars Electronica (Austria), one of the highest international honors in the field of digital arts.

For over two decades, his sound performances and installations have been presented worldwide at leading institutions such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Sónar (Spain), Mutek (Canada), DotMov Festival (Japan), L.E.V (Spain), ZKM (Germany), and Transmediale (Germany).

In 2019, he published Sur le diapason with Les Presses du réel (Paris), a book that brings to a close the frequencies series of works. That same year, his audiovisual object structures infinies was nominated and exhibited in London as part of the Aesthetica Art Prize. In 2025, his landmark installation frequencies (light quanta) is exhibited until 2026 at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Germany.

At the core of his practice are questions on the performativity of the electronic sound — a body of work shaped by collaborations with major artists across disciplines: visual arts (Manon De Pauw, Isabelle Hayeur, Jonathan Villeneuve), dance (Danièle Desnoyers, Ginette Laurin, Pierre-Marc Ouellette, Royal Winnipeg Ballet), theatre (Denis Marleau, Stéphanie Jasmin, Mark Lawes), animation film (Marie-Hélène Turcotte), and poetry (Fortner Anderson). In 2022, he collaborated with Beans, founder of the avant-rap group Anti-Pop Consortium. The result of this collaboration can be heard on the album science_fiction, described as «a uniquely surreal sound collage» by the UK-based magazine Electronic Sound.

He has released nearly fifty albums, both solo and collaborative, on notable labels including LINE (USA), Crónica (Portugal), leerraum (Switzerland), Home Normal (UK/Japan), and empreintes DIGITALes (Canada). His debut solo album received the 2010 Prix Opus for Album of the Year. In 2024, his modular synthesizer solo, Visions couleurs, was among the best albums on CDM: Create Digital Music, one of the leading platforms dedicated to music and technology.

Since 2016, he has been deeply engaged in the development of ensemble-based electronic music through Ensemble d’oscillateurs, a project that merges research-creation and pedagogy. The ensemble explores new approaches to score writing and performance techniques in electronic music; fosters contemporary creation by collaborating with about fifteen emerging and established artists (including Hervé Birolini, Cat Hope, Candas Sisman); interprets early electronic music repertoire by pioneers such as Pauline Oliveros and Else Marie Pade; and has released a trilogy of albums on the US-based LINE label. The ensemble has performed at major festivals including Sight & Sound, Akousma, and Mutek. It also supports research-creation initiatives such as a project on the aesthetics of the sine wave (2021–2024) and another on performative notation (2024–2027). In 2020, alongside colleagues at the Université de Montréal, he co-founded the highly active research collective Laboratoire formes • ondes: https://lfo-lab.ca