Newsletter no. 24
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
December, 2022
Happy Holidays to all!
Thank you to our members for sharing your timbre and orchestration news updates via the newsletter in 2022! We look forward to continuing to share your concerts, publications, project updates, and more in 2023. There will be no January newsletter; the next newsletter deadline will be January 31st. However, you are always welcome to submit updates at any time for the next newsletter! Until then, we wish you a Happy New Year!
Newsletter Editorial Team
TiPS Project at AMS-SEM-SMT: 2 Interest groups and 1 Poster Presentation
The Timbre In Popular Song (TiPS) Team was active at the AMS/SMT/SEM Annual Meeting in New Orleans! Nicholas Shea (Arizona State University) presented TiPS work at the Music Informatics Interest Group Meeting, assisted by Ben Duinker (McGill) who live-encoded a song from the 400-song, four-genre TiPS database. Furthermore, TiPS member Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University) presented at the Music Cognition Interest Group Meeting the previous day, to a different group of interested theorists and cognitive scientists. These presentations, coupled with a poster presentation at the 2022 Music Encoding Conference in Halifax, have generated interest in ACTOR-supported research and are the first step in encouraging timbre and texture research in popular music as well as responsible methodology for corpus analyses. The TiPS team includes: Nicole Biamonte, Ben Duinker, Kelsey Lussier, Jade Roth, and Jeremy Tatar (McGill), Lindsey Reymore and Nicholas Shea (Arizona State University), Leigh VanHandel (University of British Columbia), Christopher Wm. White (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Matthew Zeller (Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix).
Timbre & Orchestration SMT Interest Group
Lindsey Reymore and Stephen Spencer launched the Timbre and Orchestration Interest Group at the 2022 meeting of the Society for Music Theory in New Orleans on November 12. Stephen McAdams provided the inaugural presentation "What could the study of timbre possibly contribute to music theory?". He noted that this was a momentous occasion for enhancing timbre and orchestration research in the field of music theory.
Book co-edited by ACTOR members receives AMS prize
The American Musicological Society gave the 2022 Ruth A. Solie Award to Emily I. Dolan & Alexander Rehding (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (Oxford University Press, 2021).
The Ruth A. Solie prize considers the value of the individual contributions to the collection while at the same time recognizes the role of the editors in the conception of the volume. The publication was selected from a list of 22 nominations.
“This exceptionally well-organized, superbly edited collection of essays engages squarely with the idea of timbre that has long been neglected within the field of musicology. Rather than simply offering a summative snapshot of the current state of scholarship on timbre, this volume is exploratory in a way that both revises typical expectations for the “handbook” genre and invites future research. It attempts to recover the history of the concept of timbre and proposes highly original, and novel ways of engaging with the elusive concept... ‘For the longest time,’ notes the introduction to the volume, ‘musicology treated timbre as an afterthought.’ No longer. By affirming the importance of thinking about timbre in our discipline, this imaginatively curated collection of essays promises to be field-changing.”
This volume includes essays by ACTOR members Stephen McAdams, Meghan Goodchild, Robert Hasegawa, Michael Tenzer, and Zachary Wallmark, as well as by the editors. Read more
ACTOR Timbre & Orchestration Summer School
8-12 July 2023
Aristotle University
Thessaloniki, Greece
We are pleased to officially announce the first ever Timbre & Orchestration Summer School, which will be held at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, July 8-12, 2023. The main goal of the event is to teach timbre and orchestration from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing from research questions that span a variety of areas, including musicology, music theory, composition, acoustics, digital signal processing, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.
Visit our new website and check how to apply! The deadline for applications is February 1, 2023.
PROGRAM
In addition to two days of tutorial sessions (July 8-9), students will also attend the Timbre 2023 Conference (July 10-12) and will participate in informal discussion sessions with tutors and keynote speakers.
PROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS
We welcome graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of composition, music analysis, music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, performance, popular music studies, music psychology, musical acoustics/room acoustics, computer-aided orchestration, computer science, digital humanities, sound recording, and auditory cognitive neuroscience.
COSTS
Selected participants will be notified by March 1, 2023 and then invited to register thereafter. The Summer School registration fee will be €300 and this will include registration for the Timbre 2023 conference as well as part of the meals.
ACTOR Speaker Series — Kevin Holt
18 January | 12h00 (EST)
Online - Zoom
SAVE THE DATE! The Sub-Saharan African and Afro-Diasporic subgroup of the Diversity workgoup will present its third installation of the Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration speaker series. On January 18 2023, Dr. Kevin Holt will present a talk entitled "Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences." His presentation will take place at 12pm EST over Zoom. The series remains free, open to the public, and does not require registration. The series, spearheaded by Jason Winikoff, Joshua Rosner, and Jay Marchand Knight, will take place over the 2022-23 academic year. Other invited guests include Andile Khumalo, Joel Larue Smith, and Marvin McNeill.
Join Zoom Meeting
Website Update
Reminder: The ACTOR Project website and the Timbre and Orchestration Resource now exist as separate sites.
REMINDER: Please replace the text actorproject with timbreandorchestration. For example: https://actorproject.org/tor/modules/core is now https://timbreandorchestration.org/tor/modules/core
We welcome feedback, and indeed contributions, from you for these new sites.
Workshop Update
Y4 Workshop Report
We would like to inform all ACTOR members that the report of the Y4 Workshop is now available in the Data Repository. Please take a few moments to review the notes from each session and check all action items assigned to you. This will help us ensure that activities and research being carried out within every working group will proceed as expected. Should you have any comments, suggestions, or questions on how to access the report, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Project Update
Strategic & Research-Creation Project Funding
Four proposals were evaluated at Round 1 of the Strategic and Research-Creation Project Funding 2022-2023 (2 research-creation and 3 strategic project) by a jury consisting of Félix Baril, Eliot Britton, Robert Hasegawa, Malte Kob, Jimmie LeBlanc, and Jorge Ramos. None of the evaluators were involved in any proposal. The evaluation criteria used included the nature of the project, potential for training, benefit for ACTOR, budget justification, novelty of research, and feasibility of the timeline. The funded projects are listed below. Congratulations to all awardees!
Strategic Project:
Yan Maresz (Conservatoire national supérieure de musique et de danse de Paris - CNSMDP) [PI] with Stephen McAdams (McGill University), Yannaël Pasquier (CNSMDP), Philippe Brandeis (CNSMDP), and external collaborators Arthur Macé (CNSMDP), and Sophie Lévy (CNSMDP). "Database of scores and recordings of orchestral exams at the Paris Conservatory." $5,000 (CAD)
Research-Creation Project:
Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal) [PI] with Jason Noble (Université de Montréal), Louis Goldford (Columbia University), Gabriel Couturier (Université de Montréal), Jay Marchand Knight (Concordia University), and Theodora Nestorova (McGill University). "Evaluating Vocality in Orchestrated and Mixed Works." $7,200 (CAD)
For more information about these project, visit - ACTOR Projects
Adeline Stervinou
Adeline Stervinou is a French flutist, musicologist, and conductor living in Brazil. In 2014, she was appointed Associate Professor at the Music Department of the Federal University of Ceará in Sobral City, North-East of Brazil. Adeline started her musical training when she was 5 years old. She has always been interested in playing music in groups and has always played in ensembles and orchestras. At the age of 16, she discovered conducting, which she still practices today. Adeline studied at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (France) where she focused her interests on the relationship between cognition and music, and where she obtained her PhD in musicology in 2011. In 2012, she did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) on the topic of music education, and more precisely, on the methodology of collective teaching, which is widely used in music courses at the Federal University of Ceará in Sobral, where she teaches. Throughout the year 2022, she is working in Montreal as a guest researcher invited by Isabelle Peretz at the BRAMS laboratory.
In terms of research, since 2017 she has been investigating the cognitive processes involved in the communication between the conductor and the musicians. Her current research is related to sound processes and strategies involved in the communication between the orchestra conductor and the musicians during the rehearsal and performance contexts. "Concerning sound creation, we think mainly of the performer, the composer, but not directly of the conductor. We do not systematically make the connection between the conductor and the sound produced by the orchestra as a whole. Nor do we think about the communicative strategies put in place to make this process work." For this investigation Adeline is working in collaboration with Caroline Traube, Jean-François Rivest and Paolo Bellomia from the Music Faculty of the University of Montreal.
Photo Credit: Thamila Santos.
Timbre Geeks Networking (TGN)
We invite all student members of ACTOR who are looking to connect with other ACTOR students and apply for the Collaborative Student Project Grant to sign up for the TGN by sending an email to actor-project.music@mcgill.ca. Participants will be accepted continuously, there is no deadline to apply. Once we reach a minimum of 10 potential participants, we will contact them all and schedule a date and time that best fit their availability. In doing so, we hope to foster more collaborations and boost networking potential. Keep in mind that the two applicants must be from different institutions and one of them must be from an ACTOR partner institution.
For those who are new to the TGN, the idea is to have an informal gathering where students get to know each other. We ask that participants come prepared to briefly talk about their timbral and orchestrational interests. Our goal is to enable students to develop collaborative projects and apply for the Collaborative Student Project Grant. This funding opportunity offers $8,000 (CAD) per project distributed as $4,000 (CAD) per student. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2023.
Let us know if you have any questions.
ACTOR Student Presentations
Student members of ACTOR are eligible to apply for an opportunity to present an ACTOR-related project at the yearly ACTOR Workshop. Next year's Workshop (Y5) will be held in a hybrid format (in-person/online) July 3-5 in Strasbourg, France. The deadline to apply for ACTOR Student Presentations is 5:00pm (EDT) on February 1. Selected participants will have their travel, lodging and meals funded by ACTOR.
N.B. Please note that this year's deadline is EARLIER than usual!!
For additional information and to access the application form, visit ACTOR Student Presentations.
Satellite Meeting Funding
The purpose of the Satellite Meeting Funding is to increase ACTOR's visibility at international conferences by supporting the organization of adjunct meetings involving at least 2 ACTOR members. A maximum amount of $300 (CAD) will be provided. Applications will be accepted continuously, but must be submitted at least two months prior to the conference date. For more information on how to apply and to access the online application form, visit ACTOR Funding Opportunities.
Contributing to TOR
We encourage all ACTOR members to share their research (in progress or completed) with the ACTOR community via the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR). This may include an article, blog, or video submission containing information on project ideas, experiments, external resources/tools, teaching materials, analysis, or anything related to timbre and orchestration that you deem relevant. We believe that only in doing so will we truly benefit from the expertise and feedback from the world-class team of scientists, artists, and humanists involved in ACTOR. If you have any questions about the submission process, please contact Kit Soden.
