Newsletter no. 26
Newsletter no. 26
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
TOR Spotlight
Timbre Lingo - Passaggio and Register in the Singing Voice
ACTOR member J. Marchand Knight's new Timbre Lingo entry concerning register in the singing voice is now available on the Timbre and Orchestration Resource page. Follow the link to learn more!
ACTOR EduFilm #2 is live!
In this film, ACTOR lab partners Cameron Chameleon and Stephen McAdams explore cross-modal correspondences between sound and colour. Many thanks to Ben Duinker, Jason Noble, Stephen McAdams, Matthew Zeller, Thomas François, Chelsea Komschlies, Kit Soden, and André Martins de Oliveira for their help in the realization of this film. Stay tuned, we've got more EduFilms coming soon!
Publications
New publications involving ACTOR members have been made available:
Reymore, L., Noble, J., Saitis, C., Traube, C., & Wallmark, Z. (2023). Timbre Semantic Associations Vary Both Between and Within Instruments: An Empirical Study Incorporating Register and Pitch Height. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 40(3), 253–274. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2023.40.3.253
* This publication is the result of an ACTOR strategic project grant
For the full bibliography, please visit ACTOR publications.
An ACTOR member at the American Academy of the Arts
University of California San Diego Emeritus Composition Professor and ACTOR member Roger Reynolds has been inducted into the American Academy of the Arts.
The Academy’s American Honorary membership began in 1983 and recognizes the artistic achievement of up to twenty Americans whose work transcends the fields of architecture, art, literature, and music composition. New inductees must be first nominated by a current member, which then must be supported by two other members in order to be considered for a general vote by the rest of the academy's members.
Reynolds is one of 19 honorees to be inducted into the American Academy of the Arts in 2023 alongside director Francis Ford Coppola, actor Frances McDormand, writer Yiyun Li, orchestra conductor Maria Schneider, composer/performer Pamela Z, and composer and trompeter Wadada Leo Smith. The induction ceremony will take place in New York on May 24.
Congratulations to Roger Reynolds for this important recognition! Read more about the award here, or read the San Diego Tribune article here.
photo by Howard Lipin/The San Diego Union-Tribune
Student Presentations Funding
Congratulations to the student members selected to present at the plenary session (July 3) of the Y5 ACTOR Workshop in Strasbourg:
Jason Winikoff (University of British Columbia): The voices of ancestors: Vocal timbre descriptors in Zambian Luvale makishi masquerade
Linglan Zhu (McGill University): Comparison of perceived and imagined instrumental blend
Erica Huynh (McGill University): The role of timbre in source identification in atypically combined excitations and resonators of musical instruments
Rebecca Moranis (CUNY Graduate Center): Choreographing orchestration: A novel method for analyzing orchestration through ballet
Simon Jacobsen (University of Oldenburg): Instrument identification and blend in virtual acoustic scenes - a case study of the Tristan prelude
ACTOR Speaker Series — Andile Khumalo
13 March | 12:00-1:15pm (EDT)
Online - Zoom: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/81720365800?pwd=dzhhUVg4ZGMrOEFqQUVjcVdqNnpRQT09
SAVE THE DATE! The Sub-Saharan African and Afro-Diasporic subgroup of the Diversity workgroup will present its fifth installation of the Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration speaker series. On March 13, 2023 composer-scholar Dr. Andile Khumalo will present a talk entitled "Orchestration: A Functional Approach to Sound Organization in African Music." His presentation will take place at 12:00pm EDT over Zoom. The event is free, open to the public, and does not require registration. The series, spearheaded by Jason Winikoff, Joshua Rosner, and J. Marchand Knight, will take place over the 2022-23 academic year. The remaining speaker for this leg of the series is Joel LaRue Smith. Read more
Join Zoom Meeting: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/81720365800?pwd=dzhhUVg4ZGMrOEFqQUVjcVdqNnpRQT09
"Light" by Jimmie LeBlanc
15 March | 7:30pm (EDT)
Salle Ludger-Duvernay | Monument-National
ACTOR Member Jimmie LeBlanc's new work Light, a mono-opera-vidéo for soprano, guitar and electronics, will be screened and premiered on March 15th, as part of Le Vivier’s festival La semaine du Neuf, and co-presented by FIFA (Festival international des films sur l’art).
LeBlanc will also present the film at the next SpokenWeb Symposium (at UofAlberta), as part of their Cabaret Of Sound! event (May 3rd). Read more
6th CIRMMT-ACTOR Symposium on Orchestration Research
17 March | 12:00-2:00pm (EDT)
McGill University
555 Sherbrooke St. W. | Room A832
Zoom: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/81982160295
Meeting ID: 819 8216 0295
The ACTOR Project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) will be co-hosting a hybrid symposium on orchestration research on Friday, March 17, 12:00-2:00 pm (EDT). The event is open to all and will include four presentations by ACTOR Student Members, each followed by a discussion period. Presentations are based on the following ACTOR Collaborative Student Projects:
12:00-12:30pm – Timbrenauts: Creative explorations in timbre space by Yuval Adler (McGill University) and Berk Schneider (University of California San Diego)
12:30-1:00pm – An investigation of choral blending through soundfield capture, acoustic evaluation, and perceptual analysis methods by Kathleen Ying-Ying Zhang (McGill University) and Jithin Thilakan (Detmold University of Music)
1:00-1:30pm – Masque de fer by Martin Daigle (McGill) and Gabriel Couturier (Université de Montréal)
1:30-2:00pm – Speech as timbre models for orchestration – a comparative study between Cantonese and Québécois French by Darren Xu (University of British Columbia) and Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill)
Zoom link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/81982160295
Meeting ID: 819 8216 0295
Read more
FluCoMa Workshop
14 April | 10:00am-5:00pm
McGill University
555 Sherbrooke St. W. | Room A832
“The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa - flucoma.org) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.” (Fluid Corpus Manipulation, n.d.).
On April 14th, the FluCoMa Workshop will take place in room A-832 in collaboration with CIRMMT and the ACTOR project as well as the support of composer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, one of the developers of the library. The aim of the workshop is to bring together creative practitioners currently working with FluCoMa and to exchange ideas in a constructive and collegial environment in order to learn about different approaches and uses of the library through the presentation of ongoing projects. Participants can apply to present their projects, to address some potential problems or issues, and find solutions and alternatives.
The workshop will be bilingual with presentations both in English and French and is intended for advanced users. As stated above, students and interested participants will present their current projects that make use of the FluCoMa library. For those who are new to FluCoMa but are still interested in attending the workshop, there will be a preparatory meeting (on zoom) at the end March. The goal of this introductory session is to provide guidance in the installation process and to briefly introduce the library. Following the initial setup, the participants can continue getting acquainted with the framework by watching the available video documentation available online or following the tutorials available in the release.
The proposed dates for the preparatory meeting are March 23, 24, 29, 30 from 3pm to 5pm. If you’re interested in participating in the preparatory workshop in March, please send an email to andres.gutierrezmartinez@mcgill.ca no later than March 17 and provide —if possible— more than one date option.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop on April 14th, please send an email to the same email address stating your interest in participating in the actual workshop before the 1st of April so we can plan the day.
Y5 Workshop Registration & Lodging
REGISTRATION
We would like to invite all members to register for the Y5 Workshop. Registration is free and can be done via the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/nH9x3chXzv
Those who have already responded to the survey recently circulated will have a chance to update their responses, confirming their participation.
Members whose travel is being funded by ACTOR, such as Institutional Representatives, don't need to register.
WORKGROUP SESSIONS
Here is the list of confirmed workgroup sessions being held during the Y5 Workshop:
Acoustics of musical instruments and performance rooms
Arts, humanities, and interdisciplinary methodologies
Composer-performer orchestration research ensembles (CORE)
[ONLINE] Computer-aided and target-based orchestration (Orchidea)
Diversity workgroup
Orchestration analysis taxonomies and OrchARD.
OrchView
Timbre and orchestration analysis
Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR)
Timbre semantics
Timbre, orchestration, and the human voice
We will also have the pleasure of participating in a special Host Highlight Session and Concert organized by our fellow ACTORians at the University of Strasbourg.
A complete schedule will be available shortly.
LODGING
We have been informed that the Hôtel Esplanade, mentioned in our survey, is already fully booked and can’t be used for the workshop. For this reason, we have made arrangements with the Hotel Diana Dauphine.
Hotel Diana is a 4-star hotel and the daily rate for the workshop is 100 € + 2.42 € of tourist tax. This rate is available through a special agreement with the University of Strasbourg, therefore, the booking has to be made by them. Note that the rate may change depending on whether you will be bringing family with you.
Payment can be made at check-out, but the hotel will ask you to submit a credit card to secure your reservation.
This being said, if you are ready to make your booking, we kindly ask that you send the following information to Andre Oliveira (actor-project.music@mcgill.ca)
Full name of all guests
Check-in date
Check-out date
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
ACTOR Seminar - University of California San Diego
A Report on the University of California San Diego Fall 2022 ACTOR Seminar and Its Continuation into 2023
Submitted by Roger Reynolds Emeritus University Professor, Music Department, UCSD
In the Fall of 2022, I co-taught a seminar on the ACTOR project with Rand Steiger. There were seven UCSD grad students enrolled in the seminar. The group also included ACTOR visitor Yuval Adler, who participated energetically and usefully, while also undertaking archival responsibilities.
Five of those enrolled composed “Timbre Etudes” for the specified septet of instruments for the CORE project. We specified three mandatory criteria:
Admirable musicality
Relevance to designated perceptual, cognitive, or evaluative terminology discussed in seminar
The inclusion of an electro-acoustic dimension that is integral to the purposes of the Etude.
On February 11-12, The wasteLAnd Ensemble from Los Angeles, conducted by Nicholas Deyoe, visited the UCSD campus and recorded the five student etudes (Henson, Ko, Stallngs, Taylor, and Zheng), along with parallel works composed by the instructors (Reynolds and Steiger). All seven works will be premiered on 21 May at the Conrad Music Center’s Experimental Theater on 21 May by wasteLAnd, conducted by Nicholas Deyoe.
Much was learned and shared, and, indeed, all seven proposed Etudes were completed and recorded. Between now and the late May concert, all involved will be developing the electro-acoustic dimensions of their works, utilizing the recordings already in hand. Not only the seminar instructors (Steiger and Reynolds), but three additional UCSD Music Department Faculty are available for counselling as needed: Shahrokh Yadegari, Miller Puckette, and Tom Erb. Those members of the seminar not composing etudes [Wang and Konick] proposed analytic papers comparing two of the Etudes generated from the Seminar. These reports promise to be substantive and broad-based in their considerations.
Read more in the Project Updates on the ACTOR Blog:
Student Member Support
ACTOR Virtual Office Hours
Got questions about funding opportunities, publishing platforms, ongoing projects, or anything else ACTOR?
Stop by the ACTOR Virtual Office Hours and ask ACTOR Postdocs Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez and Ben Duinker.
Held every Thursday 12:00-1:00pm (EST), the initiative aims to inform and motivate students to participate in research and research-creation projects, and more broadly, to encourage them to take advantage of the ACTOR project to advance their own research and collaborate with other student members.
Zoom Link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/83091795949
Zoom Meeting ID: 830 9179 5949
Mondher Ayari
Mondher Ayari is a senior lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and a researcher at Ircam-CNRS in Paris. He has published, among others, essays at L'Harmattan editions such as L'écoute des musiques improvisées : essai de psychologie cognitive de l'audition. As editor and head of the "Culture et Cognition Musicales" collection, he has published several anthologies entitled: (1) De la théorie à l'art de l'improvisation; (2) Musique, signification et émotion; (3) Penser l'improvisation; (4) Les corpus de l'oralité, (5) Michel Imberty - La psychologie de la musique au-delà des sciences cognitives published by Delatour-France.
In the context of ACTOR, Ayari is involved in the project "Analysis and perception of timbre, styles of interpretation and orchestration practices in the music of the maqam in the Mediterranean," organized by the "Sub-workgroup on Middle Eastern Music and Central Asia." The project is based on three different research axes, but with a strong interdependence:
(1) The composition and perception of micro-intervals in modal polyphonic music: how to harmonize quarter tones and modal structures specific to maqâm?
(2) Acoustic and perceptual analysis of timbre and instrumental performance styles;
(3) Orchestration practices, the effects of timbre and their emotional impact on listeners: Can we speak of a theory of orchestration in contemporary Mediterranean music? Read more
Daphne Tan
Daphne Tan is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Toronto. She employs perspectives from the history of theory and music cognition to ask questions about music and the mind. Her articles on Ernst Kurth have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum (2020), Journal of Music Theory (2017), and Theoria (2015), and her translation of Kurth’s Musikpsychologie (with Christoph Neidhöfer) has been published by Routledge. A current project examines issues of public music theory and Western esotericism in Victor Zuckerkandl’s writings. With collaborators, Tan has published studies that investigate perceptions of diatonic modes, harmonic functions, and formal functions (Music Perception, 2021, 2017, 2013; Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2009), emotional communication in vocal performance (Psychology of Music, 2018/2020), and emotion and metrical dissonance (Musicae Scientiae, 2019/2021). Current empirical projects focus on the pre-dominant function in different corpora, definitions and skills associated with relative pitch, and musical communication and emotional mimicry. Tan looks forward to contributing to ongoing ACTOR projects and forming new collaborations with other members. Read more
Strategic & Research-Creation Project Funding
The deadline for Round 2 of the Strategic and Research-Creation Project Funding 2023-2024 is 5:00pm (EDT) on March 15, 2023. Projects must involve at least two members in different ACTOR institutions. The Principal Investigator for any proposal must be a regular ACTOR member at an ACTOR academic partner institution or an ACTOR co-applicant (not collaborator) at a non partner institution. Collaborators at non-partner institutions are not eligible as principal investigators for these grants but may be collaborators on the project.
The purpose of the ACTOR Strategic Project Funding is to encourage innovative research and/or pilot projects by members of the ACTOR Partnership whereas the Research-Creation Project Funding is meant to support collaborative work in timbre and orchestration between composers, performers, and researchers within the framework of the ACTOR mandate. For more information and to access the application forms, visit the ACTOR website.
Student Exchange Funding
The Student Exchange Funding aims to support ACTOR student members conducting research within the ACTOR project's mandate at an ACTOR partner institution. A maximum of $2,500 CAD per applicant in support of travel and living expenses will be provided. The minimum length of the exchange is 2 weeks. Exchanges must be between ACTOR partner institutions. Applications may be submitted online by 5:00pm (EDT) on April 15, 2023 for exchange visits from July through December. Please note that, before submitting an application, it is important to verify the travel restrictions at both the home and host institutions/countries. In order to facilitate the application process and encourage more students to apply, the letters from the home and the host institution will no longer be required. Check Student Exchange Funding for more details.
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.
