Curiosity leads Barbeau to study the main contemporary artistic trends originating from other disciplinary fields. His interest for those art forms encourage him to draw on their problematics, structures or writing processes in order to find some convergences, connivances, anchor points or to confirm aesthetic intuitions. He thus uses poetry, music, dance and architecture to renew his art, but not as subjects nor models. For example, his phonic calligraphies (1957-1960) inspired from his friend Claude Gauvreau’s poetry, his drawings inspired from Grupen by Stockhausen (1957-1960) or his interdisciplinary events from the seventies and the eighties. He even created works that fall under these disciplines: his phonic chants from the mid-eighties, which appear in the portrait film by Manon Barbeau entitled Barbeau, Libre comme l’art; his dances-action paintings from the seventies; the choreography he created for the opening dance part of his exhibit at Domaine Cataraqui (1999).