Magnetic Fields (French title: Les Chants Magnétiques) is the fifth album by Jean Michel Jarre, released in 1981 on Disques Dreyfus. The album was one of the first records to use sampling as a musical element and represents a departure from the sound of Jarre's previous efforts. For this album Jarre was partly inspired by the works of Andy Warhol and a fascination with the reproducibility of digital sound.

The long first track consists of three distinct movements, the slower second movement being heavily laden with sample work, foreshadowing the sound of Jarre's 1984 album Zoolook.

The album reached #6 in the UK charts and #98 in the US charts.

 

The album has official titles in both French and English. The French title, Les Chants Magnétiques is a play on words. Literally translated into English this means "Magnetic Songs" or "Magnetic Singing". Spoken aloud however, it sounds very similar to "Les Champs Magnétiques" (literally, "Magnetic Fields"), due to the French words chants (songs or singing) and champs (fields) being homophones. As this is not the case in English, such word play could not have survived translation, and the more straightforward title "Magnetic Fields" was chosen instead.

Les Chants Magnetiques is Jarre's first album using digital synthesizers (as opposed to analog ones used in Oxygene and Equinoxe.)

An excerpt of "Magnetic Fields Part 1" is used as the interval signal for a shortwave numbers station. An audio clip is available here. The same movement was also used as the theme music for the American television series Bare Essence (1982).

The first part of "Magnetic Fields Part 1" was also featured several times as background music for Bassie en Adriaan, a Dutch television series. On the DVD these tracks were replaced.

"Magnetic Fields Part 4" was also featured regularly in a number of Konami video games developed in the mid-1980s, including Yie Ar Kung-Fu