Newsletter no. 1
ACTOR Newsletter
Actor Kickoff, July 2018, in Montreal, QC, Canada.
Note from the Director
Welcome to the first edition of the bimonthly ACTOR Newsletter. The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration project brings together musicians, humanists,scientists and engineers to deepen our understanding of the many roles that timbre plays in music in interaction with all the other musical parameters. We take "orchestration" in the broadest sense of the choice, combination and Orchestration choices affect the way we perceive individual instruments or sound sources in a rock band, DJ mix or chamber ensemble. They can make instruments blend into a unified whole in big band jazz or symphony orchestras. They create musical structures by changing instrumentation in chorus-verse forms of pop music and in contrasts between sections in classical music. They contribute to the identity or tone of the composer or band and even the musical style. Finally, orchestration strongly determines the emotional tone in music, because the timbres or
juxtaposition of sound qualities to achieve a specific musical aim. It is present in all kinds of music.tonecolours of different instruments evoke distinct emotions. And yet, research on this essential component of music is quite recent.
The ACTOR Partnership proposes to increase attention to timbre and orchestration by bringing their musical use to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness with world-class artists, humanists and scientists. This Partnership links North American and European orchestration practice and pedagogy, stimulates the development of new creativity-enhancing digital tools for learning, creating and studying orchestration practice in concert, club, film and video game music, and sensitizes young audiences to the wonders and complexities of high-quality music.
ACTOR researchers and practitioners seek to transform music scholarship both through the application of novel analytical tools to uncover the untheorized mysteries in over four centuries of music and through the development of sound-based music analysis tools that can be applied to unnotated music or recordings of notated music. We aim to change research in the fields of musicology, music theory, music psychology, popular music studies and ethnomusicology where the role of timbre in music has not been addressed as frequently and systematically as it could be. We will transform the education of composers, arrangers and orchestrators by providing technological tools for learning the associations between symbolic representations in scores and the sonic result. Our collaborative, interactive database Orchard will provide the platform for accumulating, analyzing and disseminating knowledge and theory to students and scholars of orchestration. Our open-access, Online Orchestration Resource, designed for students, scholars, practicing composers and music lovers, will provide tools for interactively exploring the wealth of knowledge about orchestration practices. We will create tools to enhance musical creativity related to timbre and orchestration in the many genres of music, opening new avenues of musical experience through computer-aided orchestration environments that integrate cutting-edge signal-processing and machine-learning techniques into applications for composition, live performance, improvisation, and video games.
ACTOR is a transdisciplinary partnership involving 13 academic and 8 private-sector institutions and 71 collaborators in North America and Europe, including two world-class orchestras and developers of new music creation and production technologies. ACTOR brings together for the first time a highly complementary team with expertise to revolutionize thought on these important and yet-unresolved questions in musical experience.
ACTOR members who have updates on research projects, tool development, artistic productions, and pedagogical events are invited to submit posts by the 15th of odd-numbered months.
Generative Tools Update
Orchids/Orchidea Update
From Victor Cordero
Haute école de musique de Genève/Neuchâtel
The Max Package of the new Orchidea (Intelligent Assisted Orchestration) v0.4b will soon be released to the public on the IRCAM Forum. Our post-doc researcher, Carmine Cella (now Assistant Professor at U.C. Berkeley/CNMAT), has been developing this in partnership with IRCAM and HEM, and results have recently been presented at each institution. The ACTOR project wishes to acknowledge Carmine for his great work on the development of the tool. His many skills in different fields such as music, mathematics, computer programming, and aircraft piloting never cease to amaze. Gratitude must also be expressed to Philippe Esling, Yan Maresz, and especially to Kit Soden for his priceless contribution to the project. Finally, the Haute école de musique'sorchestration research would never have been possible without Éric Daubresse. He believed in the potential of computer-aided orchestration tools from the very beginning of this research and put a huge amount of energy into making it possible. Sadly, Eric passed away October 29th, 2018, before seeing his dream come to fruition. The HEM team in Geneva is committed to promoting his legacy and will pursue this research on orchestration pedagogy as he would have liked. A plan is in the works to rename the Orchidea software as ERIC - Enhanced Research in Composition.
Screenshot from Orchidea 0.4, still available on Carmine Cella's website. The new version, 0.4b, will be available in February 2019 on the IRCAM Forum."
Analysis Tools Updates
OrchView Software - Modern Tools for Music Analysis
From Félix Frédéric Baril
McGill University
On December 11, 2018 a first version of the OrchView software was presented to the McGill branch of the ACTOR team. The two-hour presentation was divided into two parts. At first we were introduced to the development challenges, the code structure, and the internal/external data flow (Keynote in PDF format). This was followed by an extensive software demonstration.
About OrchView
Designed for iPad Pro and Mac, OrchView is a stand-alone application for music analysis built in C++ on the JUCE application framework.
OrchView is an original concept by Kit Soden and is being designed by Félix Frédéric Baril and programmed by Baptiste Bohelay.
Why use OrchView?
OrchView will provide music researchers with a powerful set of music annotation tools built for the multiple ACTOR research axes.
It will accelerate the analysis process with features such as optical recognition (staves and measures), visual filtering of annotations and MusicXML data-mining functions. OrchView will support multiple audio recordings for the same analysis.
It will serve as a platform to share, exchange, and merge analyses.
Data will automatically be gathered locally during the analysis process and can be easily added to the ORCH.A.R.D database. OrchView will serve as a hub to quickly access and download ORCH.A.R.D search analyses.
It will exchange files directly with the OrchPlay software. It will be possible to quickly hear each instrument of your annotations separately or in groups and generate stereo audio files.
When will OrchView be available?
We expect to finish internal testing of the PDF and MusicXML annotation features during the summer of 2019. We anticipate a first beta version will be available around January 2020. That version will be for Mac and will include the Grouping Effects and the Orchestration Techniques analysis tools.
Stay tuned for a more in-depth preview of OrchView soon, followed by tutorials and guides as we get closer to a launch date.
Project Updates
ODESSA:
A recording for the study of orchestral blending
Montreal, September 29th and 30th, 2018
This fall, Professors Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Malte Kob (Hochschule für Musik Detmold), and Jean-François Rivest (Université de Montréal), with the support of undergraduate student Stefanos Ioannou (Tonmeister program, Hochschule für Musik Detmold), PhD candidate Kit Soden (composition, McGill University), several student assistants from l’Université de Montréal, and Professor Caroline Traube, successfully collaborated on the ODESSA Recording Project. This initiative to study orchestral blending was planned and announced during the ACTOR Kickoff Workshop in July of 2018 and realized in l’Université de Montréal’s beautiful Salle Claude Champagne in September of 2018.
Maestro Rivest led the OUM (Orchestre de l’Université de Montréal) in several excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 74, Pathétique. The excerpts were carefully selected by the team for their noteworthy orchestration. The skillful student orchestra produced a wealth of interesting raw material for the team’s study.
Many excerpts were recorded by layers as the orchestra played in turns, isolating different effects or parts, for example first extracting the accompaniment and then the melody. Tonmeister de Francisco recorded the entire session with the highest artistic and technical standards and the team proceeded to the final mixing stage together in November. Employing a variety of sound engineering practices, Professor de Francisco used over fifty microphones for this project to capture, among other things, examples of stereo miking, close miking, and ambient miking.
Professor Kob took detailed acoustic measurements of the hall with several measuring instruments, including an acoustic camera. The measurements are used to describe the acoustic features of the ClaudeChampagne hall, such as reverberation, noise level, speech intelligibility and directivity of sound radiation on stage and in the audience. The results are used to build up a guide for future measurements in partner institutions of ACTOR. A more detailed report will soon be published at the International Congress on Sound and Vibration (ICSV26) in Montreal.
The whole of the results, including scores, pictures, and sound files will be posted on the ACTOR website for the benefit of the whole community in 2019.
Orchestration Research Ensembles—Update from UBC
Project Update
Submitted by Keith Hamel
UBC, Vancouver, BC, Canada
The pilot phase of the Composer-Performer Orchestration Research Ensemble project is moving forward at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Two composers from UBC’s Doctoral program, Michael Ducharme and Ramsey Sadaka, have been engaged to write original compositions for a research ensemble consisting of bass clarinet, trombone, percussion and violin. Paolo Bortolussi will act as a performance coach and Keith Hamel will oversee the compositions. The composers have both had video interviews in which they outlined their orchestration objectives and a workshop with the composers and the ensemble was held on November 30 (which was also video-recorded.) Plans for the New Year include another video interview with the composers, as well as another workshop with the ensemble where more complete portions of the compositions can be worked on. A public performance is scheduled in March followed by a recording in the Barnett Recital Hall (with David Simpson as recording engineer). Microphone placement specifications provided by Martha de Francisco will be used for this recording. Bob Pritchard is in the process of setting up a website where the details of the project and archival material can be made available. Links to this website will be published on the ACTOR website.
Orchestration Research Ensembles—Update from UCSD
Project Update
Submitted by Roger Reynolds
UCSD, San Diego, CA, California
At the University of California San Diego (UCSD), in early March 2019, testing will be carried out that was proposed by Roger Reynolds and Miller Puckette and during the ACTOR Kickoff Workshop in Montreal in July of 2018. Tonmeister Martha de Francisco has been invited to UCSD to collaborate with a group of faculty and graduate students to explore an ideal recording paradigm for the quartet of instrumentalists that five participating universities will use during the 2019-2020 academic year. Issues of instrumental timbre regarding the violin, bass clarinet, trombone, and vibraphone with small percussion will be explored. Attempts will be made to determine an ideal setup and to record the same musicians in the same configuration in at least four different spaces: a concert hall, a recording studio, a recital hall, and a very dry experimental theater. The hope is to provide a base set of recording considerations that can be adapted to the various spaces. Participating institutions in Canada and the USA can utilize these guidelines as the actual composition, performance, and documentation of composed études emerge over the 2019-2020 year.
ACTOR Kudos
September 2018
ACTOR Axis Leader Philippe Esling and his students Axel Chemla-Romeu-Santos and Adrien Bitton won Best Oral Presentation at ISMIR 2018 in Paris for "Bridging audio analysis, perception, and synthesis with perceptually regularized variational timbre spaces," which they presented on 24 September 2018.
Post-Doctoral ACTOR member, Jason Noble, authored an article in the September edition of Music Theory Online entitled, “What Can the Temporal Structure of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical “Timelessness?” Jason is a recent graduate of McGill’s PhD program in Composition.
October 2018
ACTOR Project Coordinator, Juanita Marchand Knight, gave presentations last semester at the Lesbians Who Tech Montreal Summit and the Off-Script Conference about the ways in which technology, including computer-aided orchestration, can help bridge diversity gaps in the field of opera.
On 10 October 2018, Associate Professor of Sound Recording, Martha de Francisco opened this academic year’s Research Alive series at McGill with a presentation entitled, “Recording the Magic of the Piano - a complex interdisciplinary affair.” Professor de Francisco brought 30 years of nuanced recording experience to life with audio and video examples of her amazing work.
McGill PhD student Yuval Adler presented at the 145th AES convention in New-York (17-20 Oct., 2018), with a paper titled "Noticeable Rate of Continuous Change of Intensity for Naturalistic Music Listening in Attentive and Inattentive Audiences". The goal was to find a slow enough reduction in playback sound level which could allow safer listening over long periods of time, while minimizing any effect on the listener's musical experience.
November 2018
The International Conference on Mixed Music Pedagogy 2018 (ICOMMP-2018), for which ACTOR Associate Director Robert Hasegawa was the Organizing Committee chair, was the first event of its kind: a four-day research-creation conference on the pedagogy of mixed music (music combining acoustic and electronic sound sources). Led by artists and scholars at McGill University and the Université de Montréal, the conference included public workshops, research colloquia, and concerts featuring guest artists and lecturers from Canada, the United States, France, and Portugal. ACTOR Post-Doc Julie Delisle presented “The timbre of the flute as a controller by way of acoustic descriptors,” and PhD student Kit Soden presented “Investigating the roles of orchestration pedagogy and timbre research in the teaching of mixed music.” Professor Philippe Leroux gave a prerecorded lecture entitled “Teaching mixed music: new tools - new concepts.” Professor Pierre Michaud’s piece ...niente.... was performed and he also gave a workshop with Alain Bonardi called “Comparison of tools recently developed at Paris 8 and Université de Montréal favouring collaborative approaches in mixed music pedagogy.” Professor Laurie Radford presented “To mix or not to mix: unifying the creative process in composing for instruments and electronics” and professors Jonathan Goldman and Guillaume Bourgogne both gave pre-concert lectures. Guillaume Bourgogne also conducted concerts featuring the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble and Portugal's Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble.
In November Professor Zachary Wallmark from Southern Methodist University, presented a paper entitled, “Timbre Semantics in Orchestration: A Corpus-Linguistic Study,” at the biannual meeting of the American Musicological Society and Society for Music in San Antonio, during the segment on Timbre and Orchestration, chaired by Dr. Stephen McAdams, of McGill University.
Clément Tabary, who was an intern at IRCAM, won the best internship prize of the École Polytechnique on 16 November 2018.
ACTOR member Meghan Goodchild, who is a Research Data Management Systems Librarian at Queen’s University and at Scholars Portal of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), presented a talk on "Uncovering the mysteries of musical orchestration" at the Queen's University Principal's Symposium on Imagining Our Digital Future.
On 20 November 2018, PhD candidate, Moe Touizrar, presented, “Apperception and timbral analogies: The sunrise topic in orchestral music” at the colloquium, Lumière et musique: appropriations, métaphores, analogies, at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris, France. A portion of the presentation can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/303244786
December 2018
ACTOR Member, renowned composer, and professor John Rea was appointed to the Order of Canada, “For his musical creations and technical experimentations as a composer and a musicologist." Professor Rea has been a faculty member of the Schulich School of Music since 1973 and served as Dean between 1986-1991. Congratulations on this remarkable and well-deserved achievement, Professor Rea.
https://www.mcgill.ca/music/channels/news/john-rea-appointed-member-order-canada-292863
January 2019
ACTOR member Nathalie Hérold, in her capacity as vice-president of the French Society for Music Analysis (SFAM), helped organize a conference called "The Sciences of Music: New Challenges in a Changing Society.” The symposium had as a goal to assemble researchers, teachers, musicians, composers, students, etc., with an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international perspective and an interest for musical knowledge in its diversity.
Lena Heng, a PhD student in the interdisciplinary music research stream and a member of the Music Perception and Cognition Lab at McGill University, presented her research “Semiology Beyond the Score: Making meanings from gestures, timbres, and tropes in Chinese Music,”and performed on the erhu at the Schulich School of Music's Research Alive series on 30 January 2019. This series was launched in 2014 and is co-curated by Professor Stephen McAdams and Kit Soden.
ACTOR Blogs
Postdoc Blogs
Orchestration Post Doc Blog (OPDB) #1
Hey folks, Jason Noble here. I’m one of the postdocs with the ACTOR project, working with Bob Hasegawa and Stephen McAdams on the Output Innovation axis. I’m thrilled to be part of this project!
READ MORE
Orchestration Post Doc Blog (OPDB) #2
Hi there, my name is Julie Delisle, and I recently began to work on the ACTOR project as a post-doc on the Analysis Axis with Stephen McAdams and Bob Hasegawa. I feel very lucky to be part of this ambitious and really exciting research project!
READ MORE
Timbreducation Blogs
Amazing Moments in Timbre
We’re beginning our “amazing moments in timbre” series with a true classic, György Ligeti’s paralyzingly beautiful orchestral masterpiece Atmosphères (1961) Read More
Amazing Moments in Timbre #2
Our second Amazing Moment in Timbre is another classic, but somewhat lesser-known. It’s Canadian composer and inventor Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (1955). Read More
Amazing Moments in Timbre #3
This week’s amazing moment in timbre is a bit of a mind-bender: a piano that recreates the timbre of the human voice. It’s Peter Ablinger’s Deus Cantando (2009). for a piano being played by a computer-controlled mechanical device. Watch and be wowed: Read More
Timbre Term of the Week
Timbre Term of the Week #1 : Partial
Although we may perceive sounds such as musical notes as singular, self-contained units, the physical reality often suggests something very different. Most sounds we hear are actually complex mixtures of many different sound components, some of which are noisy and transient, others of which may have stable frequencies. Read More
Timbre Term of the Week #2 : Noise
The word noise is a familiar everyday word that has many different meanings. Here, we are interested in its acoustical sense. Read More
Timbre Term of the Week #3 : Envelope
In synthesis and sound recording and mixing, envelope describes how a sound’s amplitude (volume) changes over time. When recreating the timbre of an instrument (or other sounds such as a firetruck siren), it is equally important to get the overtone series right as it is to reconstruct or preserve the contour of the sound. Read More
Timbre Term of the Week #4 : Auditory Scene Analysis
This is a spectrograph, a way of visualizing sound in which the y axis represents frequency, the x axis represents time, and darkness or colour represents concentration of energy. Looking from bottom to top shows how the sound energy is distributed on the continuum from low to high, and looking from left to right shows how that distribution changes over time. Read More
Timbre Term of the Week #5 : Shepard Tone
In post #4 about Auditory Scene Analysis, we introduced some of the ways that sound components are grouped together by the auditory system. This has many musicalapplications, and also lays the foundation for some interesting auditory illusions. One of the most famous is the Shepard Tone, named for cognitive scientist Roger Shepard, which creates an illusion of perpetual ascent or descent. A quick search on YouTube will turn up many examples; here is a handful: Read More
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project
The ACTOR Partnership proposes to enhance attention to timbre and orchestration by bringing its musical use to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness with world-class artists, humanists, and scientists. This Partnership links North American and European orchestration practice and pedagogy, stimulates the development of new creativity-enhancing digital tools for learning, creating, and studying orchestration practice in concert, club, film, and videogame music, and sensitizes young audiences to the wonders and complexities of high-quality music.
About ACTOR NOTES
ACTOR NOTES is a bimonthly newsletter compiled and edited by ACTOR Project Coordinator, Juanita Marchand Knight in collaboration with the Knowledge Mobilization Committee and the website team
Copyright © ACTORPROJECT, 2019 All rights reserved.
https://www.actorproject.org/
Our mailing address is:
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