Newsletter no. 6
Editor’s Note
Happy March, ACTORians! As always, thanks for sharing your updates with our community. The next newsletter deadline is March 31; you can submit updates here. I’d like to take a moment to thank my colleagues on the Newsletter team. A shoutout to Andre Oliveira, the ACTOR project manager, who creates the lovely versions of the newsletter you see in your email inboxes, and to Kit Soden, our Webmaster, for fastidiously formatting the newsletters for the website. Thank you as well to Stephen McAdams, Bob Hasegawa, and Matt Zeller for their editorial efforts!
-Lindsey Reymore, ACTOR analysis postdoc & newsletter editor
ACTOR Newsletter
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES | ACTOR BUSINESS
UPCOMING EVENTS | OPEN CALLS
OUTCOMES | AWARDS & HONOURS
Funding Opportunities
The deadline for submission for the recently announced ACTOR Collaborative Student Project Grant is March 31. Up to four projects will be funded at $8,000.00 (CAD) each. The grant is for pairs of ACTOR undergraduate and graduate student members from different ACTOR partner institutions to work on collaborative projects.
March 15 marks the deadline for Strategic Project and Research Creation funding and applications for ACTOR Y3 student presentations at the upcoming virtual summer workshop. Application forms and further information for all funding opportunities can be found on ACTOR’s internal pages (login required) under “Funding Opportunities.”
ACTOR Business
We are happy to announce that the ACTOR members may now learn more about all the working groups that will be meeting for a discussion session at the ACTOR Y3 Workshop in July. Thanks to the leaders of the groups, we have made available on our website information about the ongoing research and active projects in each group, which we hope will help people get involved and connect for potential collaborations. Visit ACTOR Working Groups for more details.
New ACTOR Member Spotlights
Nicole Biamonte
Nicole Biamonte is currently Associate Professor of Music Research in the Music Theory area at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She has a baccalaureate in piano from the State University of New York at Purchase, and masters' and doctoral degrees in music theory from Yale University. Before coming to McGill, she taught at Skidmore College and the University of Iowa. Nicole Biamonte's primary research area is the theory and analysis of popular music. She has published on tonal and harmonic structures, form, and meter and rhythm in pop-rock and related genres, and is excited to explore the understudied parameters of timbre and texture in these musics. Her secondary research area is music theory pedagogy, and she is also interested in chromatic harmony and in 19th-century musical historicism.
Ana Sokolović
An important figure in contemporary music, Quebec-based composer Ana Sokolović has distinguished herself internationally through her imaginative, rhythm-driven music, with repertoire that ranges from critically acclaimed operas and orchestra works to powerful solo and chamber pieces. Originally from Serbia, Sokolović writes music infused with Balkan rhythms and influenced by multiple artistic disciplines. She recently won two back-to-back JUNO Awards for “Classical Composition of the Year”: in 2019 for Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes for countertenor, chorus, and orchestra; and in 2020 for her violin concerto Evta. Her four operas have been performed internationally, including at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; and her 2010 opera Svadba won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for “Outstanding New Opera.” Recently, the prestigious, international music publishing house, Boosey & Hawkes, has added the works of Ana Sokolović to its catalogue. For the next three seasons, she serves as composer-in-residence with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. In addition to her activities as a composer, she is Professor of Composition at the Université de Montreal.
Upcoming Events
Catherine Guastavino is co-organizing the second edition of the Urban Sound Symposium (April 19–21; https://urban-sound-symposium.org/), which includes sessions on sound art in public spaces. The Urban Sound Symposium is organized as an interactive 3-day virtual event, bringing together practitioners and experts from around the globe that are confronted with urban sound in their professional activities. It is organized simultaneously in Ghent, Montreal, Nantes, Zurich, London and Berlin by researchers from Ghent University, McGill University & CIRMMT, Université Eiffel, EMPA, UCL and TU Berlin.
Open Calls
Timbre Semantics Study: Musician Participants Needed
The experimental portion of the ACTOR strategic project “Orchestral Timbre Semantics Validation Study and Database,” which we announced last newsletter, is still underway. If you have not yet taken part, we welcome your participation. The study takes about 30–40 minutes to complete; headphones are required. To participate, click here.
-Jason Noble, Lindsey Reymore, Charalampos Saitis, Caroline Traube, and Zachary Wallmark
ACTOR Outcomes
TOR Spotlight:
Amazing Moments in Timbre
by Yuval Adler and Chris Lortie
A new blog post has been added to the Amazing Moments in Timbre (AMiT) series on the string quartet “Koan” by James Tenney. The authors describe how the piece relates to Tenney’s acoustical research questions and addresses the beauty of the work’s mathematical background. The post includes some truly stunning spectrograms and an excellent video of a live performance.
The TOR is an innovative, pedagogical, web-based resource tool for timbre and orchestration education that brings together the knowledge and expertise of the ACTOR Project. The tool offers collaborative resources on a vast range of orchestration issues. Any ACTOR members interested in contributing a blog post or TOR module should contact Kit Soden.
Publications
Hansen, N.C. and Reymore, L. (2021). Articulatory motor planning and timbral idiosyncrasies as underlying mechanisms of instrument-specific absolute pitch in expert musicians. PLOS One, 16(2), e0247136. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247136
Steele, D., Fraisse, V., Bild, E., Guastavino, C. (2021). Bringing music to the park: the effect of Musikiosk on the quality of public experience. Applied Acoustics, 177, 107910. doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.107910
Presentations
Dominique Lafortune, Philippe Macnab-Séguin and Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière presented “Introduction to the Analytical Methods of Aural Sonology (Music-as-Heard)” as part of Denys Bouliane’s graduate seminar “Semiotics and Composing: A Cross-Fertilization, or X-rated vs. IN-rated music in the ShoeBox Cauldron” on Friday, Feb. 26. The theory of Aural Sonology, developed by Lasse Thoresen over the course of his career, studies music as a perceived phenomenon rather than how a piece is constructed or notated. It allows the analyst to apprehend any work (or compare any two works), independent of style and culture, on the basis of perceptual patterns, systematized into precise taxonomies.
Awards and Honours
Shahrokh Yadegari has been appointed as the Associate Director of Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.
https://qi.ucsd.edu/news-article.php?id=3150
Moe Touizrar has been awarded a commission grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write a 30-minute piece that explores the timbral possibilities of the organ. The new work will be premiered in Helsinki by Alexandra Fol once post-COVID travel is possible.