Keep your ears open! From outside the Abbey, to the different interior spaces, sound will be your breadcrumb trail, let yourself be guided. 

You will be accompanied by music and sound for an open visit, from one space to another, and discover the sensitivity of the Abbey, its history, stories and its astonishing acoustics.

In the cellar, an animated film will welcome you and invite you into the daily life of Cistercian monks and to discover the major stages of the Abbey’s history, up to today’s activity as a Heritage Site for Culture.

For the Abbey church, 8 artists - instrumentalists or singers - have composed 8 duets for solo musicians who were able to play and experience the place’s exceptional acoustics – with almost 10 seconds of sound reverberation. Bass clarinet, serpent, cello, shakuhachi or kaval enter into a dialogue with Noirlac’s church, a vessel of light stone, under whose vaults mingle different solo or polyphonic chants.

The cloister, the only open space in the Abbey, is a central location dedicated to walking and strolling. It rustles with threads of sound, barely discernible, which evoke the search for silence. In this light sonic fog, punctuated by metallic sounds and the blowing of flutes from many different places, there is a blend of hardly perceivable murmurs, reminiscent of Saint Benedict.

In the warming room; a theatre of sound and word awaits you: in this room once dedicated for housework and manuscript copying, let yourself sink into an entanglement of sound planes, where four voices tacitly relate the life of the monks and their daily tasks.

In the refectory, inspired by the room’s functions of spirituality and nourishment, a spatialised electroacoustic creation, spreading out from the chair, evokes a recto tono (on the same note) reading of the Bible and the Song of Songs. 

In the monks’ rooms, the walls, windows and panelling of the rooms reveal their secrets to curious visitors - you may well detect the presence of previous lives there...

Finally under the wooden beams of the lay brothers’ dormitory, go for a little excursion into sounds from the outside and the surrounding nature over the four seasons.

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Dear Visitors, we would like to inform you that the résoNance sound tour is switched on from 2pm on afternoons when the Abbey is open.

Please note that some rooms on the visit will be temporarily unavailable on some days, as we may be receiving artist residences or carrying out technical setup work.  For more information, please consult our opening times calendar (which can be found here) or contact us on 02 48 62 01 01.