Newsletter no. 27
Newsletter no. 27
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
TOR Spotlight
Orchestrating Timbre
ACTOR Collaborator Magda Mayas, lecturer in improvisation at the Lucerne School of Music, part of the Lucern University of Applied Sciences and Arts, has reprinted sections of her PhD thesis Orchestrating Timbre on Timbre and Orchestration Writings. Click on the link to read Mayas' artistic research concerning timbre and orchestration from a performer/improviser's perspective. Read more
Creations & Productions
Where Can We Sing
On 3 April 2023, Jay Marchand Knight presented a multimedia installation as part of Concordia University's INDI Research Day. The installation, entitled "Where Can We Sing?", is a creative representation of Jay's research on voice timbre and gender perception; equity, diversity, and inclusion issues in vocal performance; and the German Fach System. The work was supported by Eldad Tsabary and RISE Opera, of which Jay is an active member, and included text by Jay and their supervisor, Mickael Deroche. INDI Research Day selected the creative work of 10 students to be featured in the event. Where Can We Sing? was granted the first prize. The jury consisted of three faculty members from science, visual arts, and humanities.
Click on the link to access the video documentation of Jay's installation. "The series of 6 paintings are meant to represent the Fach System, going from soprano (high/bright) to bass (low/dark) and replicating the colours on the slider in my research with participants".
DRUM MACHINES
Percussionist and ACTOR Student member Martin Daigle released his new album DRUM MACHINES on April 14, 2023. The album features extended techniques inspired by the instrumental explorations developped in Masque de Fer, an ACTOR Collaborative Student Project by Daigle and Gabriel Couturier.
Martin's second album is full-length, and it features innovative drumkit music. Along with the release of the stereo format version, a 3D binaural audio has been released to provide an immersive experience to the listeners. The entire performance was filmed and released on Martin's YouTube page. Read more about the project on his website.
Publications
New publications involving ACTOR members have been made available:
Reymore, L. (2023). Variations in timbre qualia with register and dynamics in the oboe and French horn. Empirical Musicology Review, 16(2), 231–275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v16i2.8005
Siedenburg, K. (2023). Beyond (the cave of) pitch/loudness equalization: A commentary on Reymore (2021). Empirical Musicology Review, 16(2), 336–340. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v16i2.8373
Victor Rosi, Pablo Arias Sarah, Olivier Houix, Nicolas Misdariis & Patrick Susini (2023). Shared mental representations underlie metaphorical sound concepts. Scientific Reports, 13, 5180. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32214-2
For the full bibliography, please visit ACTOR publications.
Presentations
ACTOR Speaker Series: Joel LaRue Smith
The Sub-Saharan African and Afro-Diasporic subgroup of the Diversity workgroup presented its sixth installation of the Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration speaker series. On April 3, 2023 jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and educator Joel LaRue Smith presented a talk entitled "Afro Caribbean Music: An International Impact on Culture and Aesthetic for Ensembles." This was the final talk of the 2022-2023 leg of the series, though more talks are being scheduled for the 2023-2024 academic year. The series is spearheaded by Jason Winikoff, Joshua Rosner, and J. Marchand Knight.
Video recordings of past presentations of the Afrological Perspectives on Timbre & Orchestration Speaker Series are now available on YouTube and the ACTOR website.
Musician's Auditory Perception Project - As Close as Breath
ACTOR Student members Jeanne Côté (violin) and Pedram Diba (composer) participated in the 2023 Conference of the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). They performed As Close as Breath, a work composed for the research-creation project Musician's Auditory Perception. The concert took place on April 8 in Cary Hall at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City.
Collaborative Student Project Grant 2022-2023
Congratulations to the student members whose project has been selected for funding through the Collaborative Student Project Grant:
Jason Winikoff (University of British Columbia) & Lena Heng (McGill University): Ulezo: Mapping Acoustic Properties to Timbre Descriptors in Zambian Luvale Drum Tuning
Martin Daigle (McGill University) & Pauline Patie (Université de Montréal): Real-time Timbral Analysis for Musical and Visual Augmentation
Jeremy Tatar (McGill University) & Victor Burton (Universität der Künste Berlin): Timbral, Textural, and Rhythmic Stratification in Footwork Percussion
Composing, Performing and Analyzing Contemporary Orchestration
April 26
7:30pm (EDT)
Université de Montréal – Salle Claude-Champagne
As part of the seminar "Composing, Performing and Analyzing Contemporary Orchestration" given by Jean-Michaël Lavoie, Jimmie LeBlanc and Caroline Traube, in collaboration with Pierre Michaud, five ensembles have been formed and works are being composed with the help and creative contribution of the performers in each ensemble. The concert will take place on Wednesday April 26 in the Claude-Champagne hall of the Faculté de Musique of the Université de Montréal and will present the premiere of two mixed works for septet and electronics by Simon Grégorcic and Hans Martin, doctoral students at the Université de Montréal, as part of the activities of the third round of the Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE) (2022-2023). Admission is free. Read more
Y5 Workshop
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.
LODGING
We have made arrangements with the Hotel Diana Dauphine (4-star) and the rate for the workshop is 100 € + 2.42 € of tourist tax. This rate is available through a special agreement with the Université de 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. 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
SCHEDULE
July 3 (Monday)
8:45 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Admin. Session
9:50 Coffee break
10:20 Student Presentations
12:30 Lunch
2:30 Lightning Talks (1–9)
4:00 Coffee break
4:30 Lightning Talks (10-12)
5:00 Student Grant Presentations
6:00 Timbrenauts musical interlude
6:20 Closing Remarks
8:00 Dinner
July 4 (Tuesday)
8:45 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Timbre and Orchestration Analysis | TOR Sessions
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Voice | OrchView Sessions
12:30 Lunch
2:30 Taxonomies | Diversity Sessions
4:00 Coffee break
4:30 Host highlight Session
6:00 Break
7:00 Concert
8:30 Dinner
July 5 (Wednesday)
8:45 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Timbre Semantics | Room Acoustics Sessions
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 CORE | Orchidea Sessions
12:30 Lunch
2:30 Keynote Lecture
3:15 Coffee break
3:45 Wrap-up Session
5:15 Closing remarks
8:00 Dinner
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
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
Charles-Eric Fontaine
Photo credits: Tam Lan Truong
Montreal native Charles-Eric Fontaine (* 1996) is a conductor and oboist with a passion for contemporary music and composer-performer collaboration. His detailed attention to nuance in the score and devotion to collaborating musicians leads to vivid and intimate performances. He obtained his Master’s degree in conducting at McGill University in 2021 and learned alongside Alain Cazes, Guillaume Bourgogne, Lorraine Vaillancourt and Sandro Gorli. In March 2022, he was conducting Divertimento Ensemble and recording a CD which was released by Stradivarius. In 2023, he made his conducting debut with the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. With the musicians of the Ensemble Éclat, the young conductor aspires to showcase the great works of the canon, while supporting the leading composers of the next generations.
Charles-Eric is part of the “Space As Timbre” team, a research-creation initiative whose purpose is to collect qualitative data in order to analyze and better understand the perceptual effects of timbre and metaphorical space through the orchestration for acoustic instruments. This interinstitutional collaboration led by Robert Hasegawa and Carmine Emanuele Cella includes a conducted ensemble of seven performers, three composers and a sound engineer. Following an experimentation period with the computer-assisted orchestration software Orchidea, multiple workshops and rehearsals, and ended with a conference-concert, three new pieces of music showcasing the aims of this research have been premiered, bringing forward the knowledge related to timbre and space as form bearing elements in music.
Quentin Lauvray
Photo credit: Stephanie Sedlbauer
Quentin Lauvray is a French-American composer of instrumental, acousmatic and mixed music based in Montreal. He studied at the Toulouse Conservatory in France, and subsequently obtained his Bachelors and Masters degrees at McGill University under the supervision of Chris-Paul Harman and Philippe Leroux. His music has been performed by numerous international ensembles such as Ensemble Cairn, Orchestre de Radio France, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble Ukho, and Ensemble Meitar. His music is a synthesis of his interests in research, new technologies, and literature. Alongside Charles-Eric Fontaine, Paul Çelebi and Thomas Cardoso-Grant, he is the co-founder of the ensemble Éclat, a new ensemble dedicated to contemporary music that will open its first season in January 2024.
During the 2019-2020 year, Quentin participated in the first installment of the Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE). During these months of close collaboration with the musicians, Quentin sought to imitate certain electronic sounds through listening and improvising sessions with the musicians, and through the use of computer tools—spectral analysis, computer-assisted orchestration, etc.
Beginning in the fall of 2022, his research has led him to explore the use of artificial intelligence in his composition. He worked with Tommy Davis, Kasey Pocius and Vincent Cusson on a piece for eTube⏤a new acoustic instrument with controllers⏤, electronics, and improvising agents. This research addresses issues of controlled improvisations, non-determinism, human-machine interaction, and the development of gestural and musical notations with varying degrees of precision and control.
In collaboration with ACTOR Student member Pedram Diba, he has begun writing a series of articles on space, its role and functions—both technical and poetic—in electronic and instrumental music.
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.
