Newsletter no. 10
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
July 2021
Dear ACTORians,
Thank you for your contributions to the newsletter, and I look forward to “seeing” many of our members at the virtual workshop next week! In addition to info about the workshop, this month’s newsletter highlights new performances, prizes, and publications.
We’d like to correct an error in the previous newsletter: the entry should have read that the conference Journée de l’environnement sonorewas co-organized by Catherine Guastavino. Finally, one other order of business: there will be no August newsletter, in order to give our team a much-needed break after the workshop! As always, you can submit your news on the ACTOR website at any time of the month.
Have a great summer!
Lindsey Reymore, Newsletter Editor & ACTOR Analysis Postdoc
Newsletter Menu
ACTOR Outcomes
CREATIONS & PRODUCTIONS
Murmelt mein Blut, Avant-demain, Soliloque sur, Durch, in memoriam G. Grisey
Several works by composer Fabien Lévy were performed in recent concerts:
Murmelt mein Blut, for voice and piano
21 June, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano
Manuela Rasori: soprano, Yuko Ito: piano
fromMein Liebeslied, by Else Lasker-Schüler
Avant-demain, for six car horns
Dance of exorcisation in time of social distancing
27 June, Hermannshof, Völksen, Germany
Das neue Ensemble
Soliloque sur
Commentaries from a computer about a concert misunderstood by it
1 July, Virtual, KM'21 online conference
Durch, in memoriam G. Grisey, for saxophone quartet
4 July, Postremise, Chur, Switzerland
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance
Vibe Avenue is proud to announce the release of Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance on June 22nd, a project they've been working on for more than 3 years. The game, set up in the beloved universe of the Forgotten Realms, features more than 3 hours of music, most of it recorded by live musicians, including more than one hour of choir and orchestral recordings. The game also features lots of diegetic music, where the player can see and hear the music performed in real time directly in the game. Watch the making of video and learn more about Vibe Avenue's creative process. The complete soundtrack is available on YouTube and Spotify.
Publications
New publications involving ACTOR members have been made available:
Lévy, F. (April 2021). “Wenn das kulturelle Erbe zum Fetisch wird: sind Musikinstitutionen Komplizen reaktionären und hegemonialen Denkens? (Are music institutions accomplices of reactionary and supremacist thinking?), Neue Musik Zeitung -NMZ-.
Michel, P., Andreatta, M., & Besada, J. L. (Eds.). (2021). Les jeux subtils de la poétique, des nombres et de la philosophie : Autour de la musique de Walter Zimmermann (The subtle play of poetics, numbers and philosophy: Around the music of Walter Zimmermann). Hermann, Paris.
Siedenburg, K., Jacobsen, S., & Reuter, C. (2021). Spectral envelope position and shape in sustained musical instrument sounds. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149(6), 3715-3726. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0005088
Touizrar, M., Knoll, A. L., & Siedenburg, K. (2021). Repetition and aesthetic judgment in post-tonal music for large ensemble and orchestra. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 673706. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.673706
Awards and Honours
Andara Quartet wins Springboard Competition
After winning the first Springboard Competition, the Andara Quartet will become the ensemble in residence at the Université de Montréal for the 2021—2022 season. Composed of violinists Marie-Claire Vaillancourt and Jeanne Côté, violist Vincent Delorme and cellist Dominique Beauséjour-Ostiguy, the quartet won a $10,000 scholarship and will be actively involved in the activities of the Faculty of Music as the new junior ensemble-in-residence starting September 1. Read more
Upcoming Events
Seeing Music Live
09 July | 08:00-09:30pm (EDT)
Online Event
As part of Seeing Music, a digital exhibition with interactive games & live events on music, communication and cross-modality, Charis Saitis will be participating in a live event, discussing how people associate colours and forms with sound, how human sensory experience varies across individuals, and how associations between the senses support uniquely human forms of communication like language and music. Live musicians will be improvising to drawings made in real time. Tickets are free but limited—you can reserve tickets on Eventbrite.
As part of the exhibition, C4DM student Ben Hayes has built a “timbre game” where people make timbres to match words: https://timbre.fun/: an interactive online experiment on the associations between sounds and words. Sounds familiar? This project was inspired by a paper by ACTORian Zachary Wallmark's and Ben’s own work. Read more
Technology and Timbre: An autoethnography on the influence of electronics on the composer’s orchestration practice
9 July | 12:30am-01:00pm (EDT)
Online Event
Jorge Ramos will present his research during a doctoral showcase event hosted by the Royal College of Music London. Describing his project, Jorge writes, "This research explores new methods of orchestration, focusing on the influence of electronics on orchestration practice. Through this research, I hope to uncover new findings by combining electronic (computer-assisted orchestration) and non-electronic systems (intuitive and/or traditional orchestration concepts) into what I consider to be my orchestration discourse." Read more
International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC)
28-31 July
Online
Results from the ACTOR Strategic Project Grant: Orchestral Timbre Semantics Validation Study and Database will be presented at the next ICMPC. The presentation title is "Mapping the semantics of timbre across pitch registers" and includes authors Lindsey Reymore, Jason Noble, Charis Saitis, Caroline Traube, and Zachary Wallmark. Lindsey Reymore will also be presenting "Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with Timbre Trait Profiles."
Iza Korsmit will be presenting "Multidimensional scaling of timbre dissimilarities across pitch registers at different dynamics," co-authored with Yuval Adler, Behrad Madahi, Bennett K. Smith & Stephen McAdams.
Jason Noble, Kit Soden, and Zachary Wallwark are presenting "Comparing Semantics of Individual and Combined Instrument Timbres."
"À propos" by Fabien Lévy
22 August | 01:30pm (EDT)
Hanover
Fabien Levy's work À propos, for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello will be performed by Das neue Ensemble and conducted by Stefan Meier. In the program notes, Lévy states: "Four visual artists illustrate the four movements of 'À propos'. With the exception of Giuseppe Penone, these artists do not claim to be part of Arte Povera, but all could belong to it. I appreciate each of them for their aesthetic singularity." Read more
ACTOR Business
We would like to invite all ACTOR members to participate in the ACTOR Y3 Workshop wrapping up our third year of activities. The event will take place virtually via Zoom, July 12–16. The complete schedule, including the list of student presentations and Zoom info, is available online.
This year, we want to focus our time on active discussions among our members, so our workgroup leaders have uploaded materials for you to peruse beforehand. We have also created dedicated webpages and Slack channels for each of the workgroups, so you can learn about them and start your discussions even before the workshop starts.
Not a member yet? Visit our General Information page and learn how to apply for membership.
We are pleased to announce that two of our new student representatives have been elected by acclamation. For the 2021–2022 academic year, your representatives are:
Executive Committee (EC) - Jorge Ramos, PhD student (composition), Royal College of Music London
Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) – Jade Roth, PhD student (music theory), McGill University
Knowledge Mobilization Committee (KMC) – Theodora Nestorova, PhD student (interdisciplinary), McGill University
TOR Spotlight
Timbre and Orchestration Videos
The TOR now includes a new Video page for all ACTOR-related videos. Please send any videos you'd like us to post here, either conference-related or classroom-based. You can also discuss creating a video for the TOR with us. Send videos, ideas, and questions to Kit Soden at actor-webmaster.music@mcgill.ca.
Research-Creation Series
A new article byJorge Ramos titled 'Technology and Timbre: An autoethnography on the influence of electronics on the composer's orchestration practice' has been added to the Research-Creation Series of the Timbre and Orchestration Resources (TOR) of ACTOR. Read more
Timbre and Orchestration Blog
Check out the research updates in a new post by Lindsey Reymore on the Timbre and Orchestration Blog. Read more
ACTOR Founding Members
Since the beginning of the ACTOR project in 2018, a number of collaborators and student-members have joined our cause to bring timbre and orchestration to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness. In the past three years, our community has grown from 27 co-applicants to a group of over 160 people, many of which do not know much about those behind ACTOR’s original application. For this reason, we have started the 'ACTOR Founding Members' section of our newsletter, giving everyone a chance to learn more about those who started it all.
Yan Maresz
Born in 1966 in Monaco, French composer Yan Maresz studied jazz guitar with John McLaughlin and at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, followed by study in composition at the Juilliard School in New York and at the IRCAM computer music program. He has received several prizes and awards for his work and has been a resident at the Académie de France at the Villa Medicis in Rome.
Maresz has received numerous commissions and his works are regularly performed at major international festivals, as well as by prestigious symphonic ensembles in Europe, the United States, and Asia. He was professor of composition at IRCAM from 2007 to 2012. Since 2007, he has been professor of electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, where he also taught orchestration (2008–2012). His works are published by Durand Editions.
As a composer and orchestrator passionate about timbre issues as well as the notion of "target", Maresz has been involved in research related to computer-assisted orchestration since 2003, notably at IRCAM as the initiator of the "orchestration" project which has resulted in all the versions of the "Orch" family (Orchidee, Orchids, Orchis, Orchidea).
Philippe Esling
Philippe Esling received a BSc in mathematics and computer science in 2007, a MSc in acoustics and signal processing in 2009, and a PhD on data mining and machine learning in 2012. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Genetics and Evolution at the University of Geneva in 2012. He is now an associate professor with tenure at IRCAM and Sorbonne Université since 2013. In this short time span, he has authored and co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed journal papers in prestigious journals. He received a young researcher award for his work in audio querying in 2011, a PhD award for his work in multiobjective time series data mining in 2013, and several best paper awards since 2014. In applied research, he developed and released the computer-aided orchestration software called Orchids, commercialized in fall 2014, which already has a worldwide community of thousands users and has led to musical pieces from renowned composers that have been performed at international venues. He is the lead investigator of machine learning applied to music generation and orchestration, and directs the recently created Artificial Creative Intelligence and Data Science (ACIDS) team at IRCAM.
The research project led by the ACIDS team at IRCAM aims to model musical creativity by extending probabilistic learning approaches to the use of multivariate and multimodal time series. The main object of study lies in the properties and perception of musical synthesis and artificial creativity. In this context, the team experiments with deep AI models applied to creative materials, aiming to develop artificial creative intelligence. This work aims to decipher both complex temporal relationships and also analyze musical information located at the exact intersection between symbolic (music writing) and signal (audio recording) representations. The team has produced many prototypes of innovative instruments and musical pieces in collaborations with renowned composers. Notably, they recently produced groundbreaking research prototypes, namely:
1/ Neurorack // the first deep AI-based eurorack synthesizer
2/ FlowSynth // a learning-based device that allows one to travel through auditory spaces of synthesizers, simply by moving one's hand.