Y2 | Director's Report 2019-20

Project Blog | Project Updates | Director’s Reports | Stephen McAdams | July 12th, 2020

ACTOR Director's Report 2019-20

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our second year of activities. I hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their activities in spite of the challenges presented by the pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course had to go virtual as did this year's workshop, but everyone rose the challenge as best as circumstances allowed, and this year's slate of workgroups is a testament to the resourcefulness and devotion of our community.

News on ACTOR Post-docs

Julie Delisle and Jason Noble have been very active leaders in many aspects of the ACTOR Central team. Julie moved to a job with Audiokinetic in Montreal at the beginning of June and Jason will be starting a new post-doc at the Université de Montréal with Caroline Traube and Pierre Michaud. We will sorely miss their excellent contributions to organization, research, mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and the Timbre and Orchestration Resource, but mostly we'll miss working closely with them on a regular basis. We certainly hope they will stay in contact in their new jobs.

Two new post-docs have been hired as of September 1st (hoping that all goes well with the immigration services under the current situation!). Lindsey Reymore completed her PhD in cognitive music theory with David Huron and Daniel Shanahan at Ohio State University and Matthew Zeller completed his PhD in musicology with Larry Todd at Duke University. We welcome them wholeheartedly to the ACTOR Project and look forward to their many contributions..

Active ACTOR Projects

The publications, realizations and concerts related to ACTOR's mandate from individual members within a given institutional partner are too numerous to list here. I will focus on a number of ACTOR projects involving two or more institutional partners and independent 3 members that are worth mentioning in that they demonstrate the usefulness of the partnership in stimulating collaboration.

The Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE) are progressing well and are amassing a great deal of material that is crying out to be analyzed by ACTOR members, including transcriptions of interviews, written texts, sketches and scores, audio recordings of exploration and rehearsal sessions and concerts, video interviews, and video documentaries. [Partners: McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of California at San Diego, Université de Montréal, University of Toronto.]

The Orchestral Distribution Effects in Sound, Space, and Acoustics (ODESSA) project has a combination of massively multitrack recording of ensembles and an orchestra, as well as room acoustic measurements. In this project, perceptual experiments and critical listening studies have also been conducted on orchestral blend perception as a function of various mixing techniques. [Partners: Detmold University of Music, Haute école de musique de Genève, McGill University, Université de Montréal.]

Orchestration Taxonomies/OrchView/OrchARD. This multipronged project attempts to develop tools and methods for exploring the analysis of orchestration practice. It began with the development of a taxonomy of orchestral effects related to auditory grouping principles and has begun expanding to include orchestration techniques as described in orchestration treatises and employed in orchestration courses. The analysis aim is being facilitated by a score annotation platform called OrchView, the annotations in which will be exportable to the Orchestration Analysis and Research Database (OrchARD) to be searched and mined by orchestration researchers. Potential future branches of analysis include functional orchestration and aural sonology. [Partners: Haute école de musique de Genève, McGill University, OrchPlayMusic, Université de Strasbourg, with an independent collaborator from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig.]

The Timbral Semantics project is developing a large-scale, online study of timbre semantics in which participants are presented with natural instrument sound stimuli and asked to rate them on a battery of semantic scales (e.g., warm, bright, hollow). Results will help us better understand the effects of instrument identity, range, and musical background on timbre perception, language, and meaning. The findings of this project will contribute to a database to be further developed over the course of the ACTOR project. [Partners: McGill University, Université de Montréal, with independent collaborators from University of Oregon, Queen Mary University of London]

Proposal for a book on orchestration submitted to Oxford University Press: Sounding Together: The Art and Science of Orchestration, J. Delisle, R. Hasegawa, J. Noble, M. Touizrar (Eds.) This book argues for the centrality of orchestration in musical practice and examines this often neglected topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Book sections include theorizing orchestration, analytical approaches, tools and techniques, and orchestration in practice. [Other ACTOR contributors: C. Cella, E. Dolan, P. Lalitte, S. McAdams, J. Rea, L. Reymore, K. Soden, C. Traube, M. Touizrar, Z. Wallmark]

Orchidea and Computational Tools for Orchestration involves interconnected projects linking computer science, perceptual research, and orchestration through the development of a platform for target-based computer-aided orchestration and various tools using machine learning techniques for modeling orchestration practice and perception. Connected projects include eOrch and Makimono. [Partners: Haute école de musique de Genève, IRCAM, McGill University, OrchPlayMusic, with an independent collaborator from the University of California at Berkeley.]

Diversity and inclusion in ACTOR research. We are giving much thought to ways of increasing the diversity and inclusion within ACTOR's activities. A workgroup on this topic has been started by Juanita Marchand Knight and Robert Hasegawa. Among the goals are: 1) extending the scope of ACTOR research topics to include more works by composers from underrepresented groups and 2) encouraging the inclusion of researchers (both faculty and students) who make our project more diverse and extend the repertoires that we cover. Anyone interested in discussing these issues should contact Juanita and Bob.

— Stephen McAdams, 12 July 2020