Newsletter no. 2
ACTOR Newsletter
Awards and Honours
April 2019
Jeux de Chromes by Dominique Lafortune (DMus, Composition, McGill University) was premiered by the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, under the direction of Guillaume Bourgogne in Montreal on April 12, 2019. The piece was written on the basis of Lasse Thoresen’s work on form-building patterns, processes, and transformations as laid out in his book Emergent Musical Forms.
May 2019
Philippe Macnab-Séguin (DMus, Composition, McGill University) has been awarded the 2018-19 Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize for Orchestral Composition. His orchestral piece will be premiered by the McGill Symphony Orchestra in the 2020-2021 season.
June 2019
Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière (DMus, Composition, McGill University) has been awarded the 2019 “Prix d’Europe en Composition” from l'Académie de musique du Québec, providing him with funding to study in Oslo with Professor Lasse Thoresen over the coming year. His thesis piece, Dériver, for sextet, was premiered on April 3, 2019 by Ensemble Paramirabo in Montreal and uses many of the dynamic form principles elaborated by Thoresen in his book Emergent Musical Forms. In addition, Gabriel has been commissioned to write a work for ensemble in the framework of the 2020 ECM+ Generation program, to be premiered and toured starting in October-November 2020.
Eliot Britton (Assistant Professor in Composition, Music Technology & Digital Media University of Toronto) won a DORA award for his work on TRACE produced by Red Sky
September 2019
Emily MacCallum (MA, Musicology, University of Toronto), student of Sherry Lee, is the first recipient of the ACTOR Student Exchange funding. She will visit McGill University in Montreal, Canada to participate in graduate seminars on the perception and analysis of timbre taught by Professors Stephen McAdams and Robert Hasegawa.
Hochschule für Musik Detmold has hired a new scientific co-worker, PhD student, Jithin Babu P. Thilakan, for 3 years to work on ensemble sound within the Marie-Curie funded VRACE project.
ACTOR Outcomes
Conference Participation
Spectralisms 2019
“Spectralisms 2019,” a three-day conference, was held at Ircam from June 12 to 14, 2019, as part of the activities of the ManiFeste 2019 festival. Read more
ACTOR at ManiFeste 2019
ACTOR scholars and artists introduced the project to a French public this June with “Orchestration and the ACTOR Project,” a study day hosted by the Paris research center IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique). Read more
Pattern - Algorithmen -Symmetrien: Strukturen und ihre Verfügbarkeit in musikalischer Theorie und Praxis
Nathalie Hérold’s paper, "Patterns, Algorithms and Symmetries in Timbre and Orchestration Analysis: Some Considerations in the Context of 19th- and 20th-Century Music", was presented at the International Conference "Pattern - Algorithmen -Symmetrien: Strukturen und ihre Verfügbarkeit in musikalischer Theorie und Praxis", held at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, Germany, on the 28th and 29th of June, 2019. Read more
ACTOR Year 1 Workshop
The ACTOR Year 1 Workshop took place in Paris from 13-15 July 2019 and was hosted by IRCAM. Read more
ACTOR Symposium - SMPC
A special symposium dedicated to the ACTOR Project at the 2019 Biennial Meeting of the Society of Music Perception and Cognition in New York.
CogMIR
ACTOR director Stephen McAdams gave a keynote speech and ACTOR member Aurélien Antoine presented. Read more
Publications
Acoustic Space, Modern Interiority, and Korngold's Cities
A new essay entitled "Acoustic Space, Modern Interiority, and Korngold's Cities," co-published by Sherry Lee and Sadie Menicanin in Korngold and His World (eds. Daniel Goldmark and Kevin Karnes; Princeton UP, 2019), presents a sound-studies perspective on the music of prodigious orchestrator Erich W. Korngold, whose operatic and film music has been hugely influential for the character of orchestrational practice and, indeed, the orchestral sound world of the 20th C and beyond. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.
Semantic crosstalk in timbre perception
Zachary Wallmark published two empirical articles on timbre semantics. The first, entitled “Semantic crosstalk in timbre perception” presents results from three experiments indicating that congruency of matches of timbres and adjectives (e.g., the word "rough" presented alongside a "rough" sound) influences processing fluency. This result suggests that semantic crosstalk may influence timbre perception. (Music & Science, 2, 1–18). The second, currently in press, is entitled, “Creating novel tones from adjectives: An exploratory study using FM synthesis.” (Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain). Participants interacted with a 2D FMsynthesis interface with the aim of crafting "best fit" tones for a range of common adjectives. Adjective prompts generated consistent acoustic profiles as a function of word valence and arousal. The study reverse engineered the standard timbre semantics paradigm (in which participants hear sounds and respond with verbal scales).
ACTOR Business
Strategic Projects
Project Updates
OrchView / OrchPlay - Developments and Progress Report
Progress on the programming, design and development of the OrchView software in the context of the ACTOR year 1 Workshop in Paris. Read more
Aural Sonology taxonomic leg
Development is under way for the Aural Sonology taxonomic leg in close collaboration with Norwegian composer and music theorist Lasse Thoresen. Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, Dominique Lafortune, and Philippe Macnab-Séguin have met regularly with Lasse Thoresen in the course of the year for supervision on various projects involving Aural Sonology, including the writing of a series of articles providing an overview of the Aural Sonology method in French and supervision of their doctoral research, in which each of them applies the concepts of Aural Sonology to their own compositional practice in a unique way. Read more
A musicXML protocol
A musicXML protocol has been created by Philippe Macnab-Séguin (DMus, Composition, McGill University), Aurélien Antoine (Postdoctoral fellow, Music Technology, McGill University), and Félix Baril (DMus, OrchPlayMusic, Inc.) that allows for a standardized system of metadata, instrument names, playing techniques, and precise percussion instrument information, as well as professional-quality graphic rendering in OrchView, using SeeScore as a graphical interface. Read more
Public Outreach
The Knowledge Mobilization Committee is working with partners at UBC, UCSD, McGill, University of Toronto, and Université de Montréal to produce a short video documentary on the CORE project. The video will be presented at the 2020 ACTOR meeting in San Diego.
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
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