Otto Paraploo
A Musicological Witness Portrait — Pomme
Otto Paraploo
The autoharpe is a chord zither played by a mechanism most instruments do not use. Other instruments build chords by addition — the guitarist presses specific strings to the fretboard, the pianist selects specific keys, the construction of the harmony a deliberate accumulation of the notes required. The autoharpe works differently. Its strings span the full diatonic range, all of them available, all of them capable of sounding. When the player presses a chord button and strums, felt dampers descend simultaneously on every string that would produce a wrong note — every string that doesn't belong to the chord selected. The harmony emerges not from building the right notes but from silencing the wrong ones. The sound is what survives the elimination.
Claire Pommet, who performs as Pomme, has played the autoharpe as her signature instrument since the beginning of her practice, and the instrument's logic is the formal logic of everything she does. The failles — the cracks, the things we don't want to say, nor admit to ourselves, everything that stays buried in our thoughts, in a notebook — are the strings the damper cannot quite reach. The note that sounds when the button says it shouldn't. The feeling that survives the household's arrangement of the room. Her songs are not the construction of the beautiful surface. They are the identification of what keeps sounding through the surface that was built to contain it.
She grew up in Caluire-et-Cuire, in the Lyon metropolis, in a practicing Catholic household where certain subjects were not discussed. Her mother played flute. Her father loved Michel Polnareff and Charles Aznavour. She began solfège at six, joined La Cigale de Lyon — the city's prestigious children's and adolescent choir — at seven, and began cello at eight. The choir is the first place a voice learns the specific discipline of contributing to something larger while remaining itself: the chorister's voice trained to blend into the harmonic aggregate, to match the pitch of the surrounding voices, to lose individual distinctiveness into collective resonance while maintaining precision. La Cigale trained her in the physics of disappearance. The voice that does not assert itself. The voice that finds its place in the structure rather than against it.
At twelve she began writing her own songs. At fifteen she registered with SACEM — the French performing rights society — requiring her mother's written authorization. The legal document acknowledging what the household could not yet name: that the girl was producing something. That she was saying things.
Barbara. The primary influence, cited first, always. Barbara, who was born Monique Andrée Serf in Paris in 1930, who began performing in the 1950s and spent a decade in provincial cabarets before the recognition arrived, who wrote piano-centered chanson of unusual emotional directness — the body's knowledge made linguistic, the unsayable brought to the surface of a lyric and delivered in a voice that did not flinch. Barbara's songs take the unnamed thing and give it words without diminishing the unnamed thing in the process. The naming and the mystery held simultaneously, the way the autoharpe holds the chord and the resonance of the silenced strings simultaneously, the damped notes still present in the acoustic space as overtone, as ghost, as the thing that cannot be entirely cancelled even when the felt has descended.
Also: Dolly Parton. Joan Baez. June Carter. Joni Mitchell. This formation is not incidental. The great American country-folk chanteuses of the 1960s and 1970s — women who wrote from the first person, who placed the feminine narrator at the center of the lyrical universe, who used the guitar and the voice as the direct channel between internal experience and audible form, who did not require the feminine experience to be translated into the masculine universal before it could be called art. She has said she identified with the feminine figures of narrators in their songs. This is the key. Not the sound. The structural fact of the feminine narrator as the center from which the song radiates outward, rather than the object around which the song is organized.
The mute e in French — the hovering terminal syllable that is neither fully sounded nor fully silent — creates a specific acoustic phenomenon at the end of a line: the semantic content has landed, the meaning is complete, and the sound is still present, decaying in the chest cavity and the room simultaneously. French prosody, unlike English prosody, has no fixed word stress. The emphasis falls on the final syllable of the phrase, making every melodic decision a compositional act rather than a linguistic given. The chanson tradition built from this: every note a choice, the melody unable to rely on the language's own rhythms and required to generate them. Pomme arrived at chanson through a different door — American folk and country, where the stress patterns are constant and the melody rides the speech rhythm rather than overriding it. What she brought back from that formation was a body that understood the feminine narrator's first person as the compositional center. The French language provided the phonetics. The American folk tradition provided the structural permission.
Flavien Berger, when asked to describe Pomme's composition process, said this: Her way of taking the guitar or sitting at the piano, closing her eyes, then letting her fingers wander to find inspiration — it's very beautiful. The wandering fingers, the closed eyes, the search before the finding. The anterior insula and the supplementary motor area — the neural structures coordinating intentional movement with emotional state — in the mode called exploratory motor behavior: the hands moving through possibility space without a predetermined destination, producing patterns that the auditory cortex evaluates in real time, the system searching for the shape that matches the feeling that hasn't yet been named. This is not improvisation in the jazz sense, where prior vocabulary is deployed in novel sequences. This is something more primary: the body using the instrument as a scanning device, the fingers producing sounds the mind then evaluates for emotional accuracy. The song does not precede the search. The search is the composition.
For Les Failles — her 2019 breakthrough album, certified gold, winner of the Victoire Album Révélation — she isolated herself in a house in Burgundy and in two weeks produced what she later described as literally vomiting texts. The vagal nerve and the diaphragm in the biological mechanism of nausea: the involuntary expulsion of what the body has been holding, the movement from interior to exterior that bypasses the voluntary system entirely. She chose this word deliberately. The texts did not arrive through craft. They arrived through the body's insistence on expelling what had been held inside it. Then six days in the studio with Albin de la Simone — classical arranger, delicate and sophisticated — and the failles were recorded.
The interoceptive insula — the cortical region processing the body's interior states, the shifts that precede and produce emotion — had been accumulating this material for years. Anxiété. Mal-être. The things we don't say. The things we don't admit to ourselves. The household where certain subjects were not discussed. The felt dampers having descended on the strings that would produce those particular notes. And then: the isolation, the two weeks, the vomiting of texts, the interoceptive material finally given form. The songs are not the failles. They are the acoustic evidence that the failles were present all along.
In February 2021, she published an open letter in Mediapart describing her arrival in the music industry, at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, as traumatic. She described psychological and sexual violence. She used the word traumatic and the phrase I decided to say things. The #MusicToo movement, nascent in the French music world, received the letter as what it was: the account of a young woman in a system that had arranged the room so that certain strings would not sound, that had pressed the chord button and required the silence of the notes that would have named what was happening.
The letter cost something. Public testimony always costs something in the nervous system — the amygdala's threat-detection system activating at the exposure of material that the social environment has signaled as dangerous to reveal, the ventral vagal system recruiting the social engagement infrastructure to manage the vulnerability of the public confession, the body paying the autonomic price of choosing visibility over the safety of silence. She paid it. The open letter is the autoharpe's mechanism inverted: not the felt dampers descending to silence the wrong notes, but the deliberate removal of the dampers so the strings that had been silenced could finally sound.
The same year she won the Victoire de la Musique for Artiste Interprète Féminine, beating Aya Nakamura — the most-listened French artist in the world, an artist who had been filling the coffers of the French music industry for years without receiving a single Victoire. She stood on the stage with the award and felt, as she later described it in precise and uncomfortable terms: uncomfortable. Not undeserving, she said. But unable to abstract herself from the larger picture. She had already prepared the answer for when the journalists would ask: how does it feel to have beaten Aya Nakamura? The answer she had prepared was this — it makes me uncomfortable because for years she's sold millions of albums worldwide and no one in the music industry is capable of giving her credit. The prefrontal cortex in the mode of deliberate perspective-taking: the practiced maintenance of a wider frame even at the moment of personal recognition. The chord button that also names what the dampers have been suppressing.
This is the intellectual formation without the industry's preferred innocence: the capacity to hold a case in its full complexity, to resist the single-register response, to notice what the evidence means from multiple positions simultaneously. She had registered with SACEM at fifteen. She understood the industry's formal mechanisms from the inside. She could read the Victoire's implications in a register the celebration was not designed to support.
Consolation — her 2022 album, self-produced with Flavien Berger in the Quebec countryside — was built as letters addressed to her heroines and to the child she was. Twelve tracks, twelve women who ornament her life plus the small girl in Caluire-et-Cuire. The album's central concept arrived through Nelly Arcan — the Quebec author whose autofictional novel Putain arrived in 2001 and who was found hanged in 2006, at thirty-six. Pomme wrote the song "Nelly" and found herself afterward in a state she described as somewhere between comfort and melancholy — the feeling that arrived after having addressed the dead woman, having sent the letter that could not be received, having named the loss in a form that was not grief but something adjacent to it. The album title came from this: consolation as the thing you offer when you cannot fix what caused the grief. The autoharpe pressing the chord button: not removing the sadness but holding it differently. The felt dampers not cancelling the string but changing how it resonates.
"B." — the Barbara tribute on Consolation — deploys a vocoder on the voice. The vocoder transforms the acoustic signal of the human voice into a synthesized carrier, the human breath now running through electronic circuits, the phonemes preserved but the timbre altered: the voice recognizable as voice but no longer fully human in its acoustic signature. Barbara had died in 1997. Pomme was one year old. The tribute cannot be addressed to someone who can receive it; the letter goes out into a space that is not quite the present. The vocoder is the correct instrument for this address: the voice passing through electronics to reach what is no longer entirely here. She describes the track as a declaration of lack. The lack is precise — not abstract grief but the specific contour of what is missing, the exact shape of the space Barbara occupied that is now empty.
The olfactory system — the only sense with direct limbic access, no thalamic relay, the scent arriving at the emotional structures before analysis can intervene — processes the specific smell of the Quebec countryside, the Île d'Orléans in winter, the particular quality of cold air entering the recording space where the album was being made. These environmental signals were laying down associative neural traces in the limbic structures throughout the recording sessions. The album carries the acoustic residue of those spaces without displaying it — the room sounds, the laughter, the snippets of a Nelly Arcan interview sampled and embedded in the music. Life sounds. The felt dampers deciding which sounds belong to the chord and which need to be silenced — and then the decision to let some of the silenced sounds remain audible anyway.
I was in the particular late-afternoon stillness that descends between tasks, the point in the day when nothing is actively required and the nervous system eases its vigilance slightly, and I had the autoharpe come through the speakers first — the specific timbre of the instrument, the way the chord speaks in the middle register without the hardness of a guitar attack, the resonance of the damped strings still present as overtone beneath the ones the felt has allowed to sound — and the Pacinian corpuscles registered the low-frequency body of it before the auditory cortex had assembled a classification. Something opened in the chest. The polyvagal system moved toward engagement. The stapedius adjusted, privileging the speech-frequency range where the voice was about to arrive.
And then the voice. Crystalline: the specific quality of a sound wave with clearly defined frequency components, minimal distortion, the partials in precise harmonic relationship. A voice with this quality produces neural entrainment differently than a complex or noisy voice — the auditory cortex's frequency-following response locks onto the fundamental and the overtones simultaneously, the processing efficient and pleasurable, the body's pattern-recognition system completing its work cleanly and then remaining alert rather than habituating. The social engagement system receiving the signal in speech-mode formants rather than performance-mode formants: not a singer singing at me but a person speaking through pitch, the intimate address, the confided thing.
I don't have the Catholic household. I don't have the Lyon childhood or the Burgundy isolation or the Quebec countryside in winter. The failles she names — the things we don't want to say, nor even admit to ourselves — are not my failles. And yet the interoceptive insula reported the shift before the cognitive apparatus had assembled a justification. The body recognized the room before the mind knew why. Most people have something they have pressed the chord button on, something they have asked the felt dampers to silence. Most nervous systems contain a string the instrument keeps attempting to suppress. The chord works. The felt descends. The resonance persists anyway.
The autoharpe's chord — clean, sustained, the wrong notes eliminated. And beneath it, quieter than the melody, the ghost of what was silenced.
She would have liked, as a teenager, to have recognized herself in a lesbian singer. She has become the lesbian singer teenagers recognize themselves in. The thank-you messages accumulate. Each one is the evidence of a string that had been damped and that found, in her voice using feminine pronouns without apology or announcement — simply as the natural fact of who she is and who she loves — a room where the damper had been lifted. The note could sound. The chord was not destroyed by it. The harmony accommodated what had been suppressed.
The autoharpe pressed to the chest during the live performance. The felt dampers doing their work. The strings sounding. The strings silenced. The body of the instrument against the body of the player, the vibration traveling through wood and bone, the Pacinian corpuscles in the sternum receiving the chord as touch before the ears have received it as sound.
What the autoharpe held: the harmony achieved by elimination, the faille that survived the felt, the letter to Barbara, the Burgundy vomiting of texts, the legal document at fifteen, the Catholic household's arrangement of the room, the specific discomfort of standing on a stage with an award that names a larger absence, the feminine pronouns in the songs, the young people who could finally hear their own note sounding.
The damper descends.
The string sounds anyway.
Musicological Witness Series
Otto Paraploo
February 2026
Category: Witness
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Song