Newsletter no. 11
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
September 2021
Bonjour, readers!
Best wishes to all those settling back into the academic year groove. We are happy to share this month's newsletter, which includes several new and exciting calls for participation within ACTOR. These opportunities include a composition competition for the ODESSA IV recording project, a call for scripts for ACTOR edutainment videos, and the upcoming round of the Strategic Project and Research-Creation funding. We look forward to working with you to actualize many new collaborations in the coming year!
Lindsey Reymore, newsletter editor and ACTOR Analysis Postdoc
Newsletter Menu
OUTCOMES | AWARDS & HONOURS
ACTOR BUSINESS | ACTOR FOUNDING MEMBERS
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
ACTOR Outcomes
CREATIONS & PRODUCTIONS
Publications
A new publication involving an ACTOR member has been made available:
Wallmark, Z., Nghiem, L., & Marks, L. E. (2021). Does timbre modulate visual perception? Exploring crossmodal interactions. Music Perception, 39(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1525/MP.2021.39.1.1
For the full bibliography, please visit ACTOR publications.
Awards and Honours
City to City 2021: Jorge Ramos selected by UNESCO Initiative
Jorge Ramos has been chosen to represent Braga in this year's edition of "City to City," an initiative that encourages the creation of new pieces of art through artistic collaborations. Jorge will receive a grant in the amount of 2000 Euros and will bring together recognized media artists and international curators in order to discuss ideas about the work to be presented. The final work will be presented at the end of the year at international events. Read more
ACTOR Business
Project Updates
ACTOR Mentoring Program
The ACTOR Mentoring Program for the 2021–22 academic year is up and running! Participants received introduction emails during the last week of August. The Training and Mentoring Committee paired 30 mentees with 18 mentors.
Mentors and mentees will meet for a minimum of 30 minutes once per month (Sep–Dec and Feb–May) throughout the academic year. The TMC will gather anonymous data at the end of each semester with the hopes of improving the program year-to-year.
Additionally, at the end of each semester, the TMC will hold a group mentoring workshop. The first workshop will focus on abstract/proposal writing and will be held in late November or early December 2021 (details TBD).
The TMC thanks all the participants and wishes everyone a fruitful mentoring partnership!
Website Updates
ACTOR Internal Directory
We are glad to announce that the ACTOR Internal Directory is finally ready for visualization! Access it here (restricted to members only): Internal Directory.
Created to boost connection and networking potential within the ACTOR community, the database contains information about ACTOR members that could be relevant for collaborations such as their research interests, skill sets, expertise, and projects in which they are currently involved.
If you are an ACTOR member and wish to be included in this directory, please do so by filling out your information via this form (it should take about 5-7 minutes): “ACTOR Internal Directory Submission Form".
ACTOR Y3 Workshop
In July, the Director of the ACTOR Partnership, Stephen McAdams, welcomed all members for the Year 3 Workshop, which concluded our third year of activities. The five-day event was held virtually (again!) due to the pandemic, but everyone rose to the challenge as best as circumstances allowed.
This year's slate of workgroups was a testament to the resourcefulness and devotion of our community. We were happy to see a total of over 90 people participating in the 12 working group sessions, which produced very intense yet insightful discussions. While building the ACTOR community, members had an opportunity to get updates on various projects, to network, and to form new collaborations.
The annual workshop also included presentations given by seven of our student members as well as brief reports from the Project Director, the Training and Mentoring Committee, and the Knowledge Mobilization Committee. The three newly elected student representatives were introduced, and the new Mentoring Program was launched.
We would like to thank all workgroup leaders for the time invested in the organization of each session. A word of gratitude is also due to you, our members, for participating, researching, and helping us bring timbre and orchestration to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness.
We are looking forward to seeing you all (in person) in Calgary next year!
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.
Laurie Radford
Laurie Radford is a Canadian composer, sound artist, music technologist, educator, and researcher who creates music for diverse combinations of instruments and voices, electroacoustic media, and performers in interaction with computer-controlled signal processing of sound and image. His music fuses timbral and spatial characteristics of instruments and voices with mediated sound and image in a sonic art that is rhythmically visceral, formally exploratory, and sonically engaging.
His music has been performed and broadcast throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. He has received commissions and performances from ensembles including the Aventa Ensemble, Ensemble Transmission, Esprit Orchestra, New Music Concerts, Le Nouvel Ensemble Modern, L'Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, Meitar Ensemble, Paramirabo, Pro Coro Canada, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Trio Fibonacci, the Penderecki, Bozzini and Molinari String Quartets, and the Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Montréal Symphony Orchestras. He has contributed articles and reviews on electroacoustic, interactive and audiovisual composition to journals such as Computer Music Journal, Circuit, and eContact!
Radford’s music is available on empreintes DIGITALes, McGill Records, PeP Recordings, Clef Records, Eclectra Records, Centrediscs and Fidelio Audiophile Recordings. He has taught composition, electroacoustic music and music technology at McGill University, Concordia University, Bishop’s University, University of Alberta, City University (London, UK), and is presently Professor at the University of Calgary.
Ichiro Fujinaga
Ichiro Fujinaga directs the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Lab, which focuses on developing and evaluating practices, frameworks, and tools for the design and construction of worldwide distributed digital music archives and libraries, with a particular interest in optical music recognition research.
Ichiro is an Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. He has degrees in Mathematics (B.Sc, Alberta), Music/Percussion (B.Mus, Alberta), Music Theory (MA, McGill), and Music Technology (PhD, McGill). He is the Principal Investigator of the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project.
Funding Opportunities
Strategic & Research-Creation Project Funding
The deadline for Round 1 of the Strategic and Research-Creation Project Funding 2021-2022 is 5:00pm (EDT) on September 15, 2021. 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. 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 aims to provide paid opportunities for students and artists in vulnerable positions due to the COVID-19 crisis. For more information and to access the application forms, visit the ACTOR website.
Open Calls
Scripts for ACTOR Edutainment Films
We invite all ACTOR members to submit script proposals for individual films to appear in an animated edutainment film series. Edutainment films combine education and entertainment in fun, innovative, and informative stories. The films are targeted toward curious students and an educated lay audience. The series will appear on the ACTOR/TOR websites and the ACTOR YouTube channel.
Each film will be approximately 1.5–3 minutes in length. There may be an opportunity for longer films in the future, but this first series is meant to be short hooks that raise awareness and drive people to the ACTOR website and our research. Scripts will undergo a peer review process within ACTOR and may be edited for content or style by the ACTOR production team. You may propose more than one script, but each proposal must be a separate submission. We are hoping to select 5–10 scripts for production.
Details and guidelines can be found in the submission portal.
Deadline: 1 October 2021.
ODESSA IV: Composition Competition for ACTOR Student Members
The ODESSA IV research team is launching a Composition Competition for ACTOR Student Members* to compose a theme and variations for a Violin Ensemble (nine violins), which incorporates the musical attributes listed below. The duration of the work can be 5 to 7 minutes. For research purposes, the theme statement and at least one of the variations must be a unison line (tutti), the other variations can and should contain other layers/textures/harmonies etc. The composition must take into account that a student ensemble will be making the recording and that there is limited rehearsal time; the playability of the score will therefore be one of the factors in the jury’s decision.
Throughout the variations, one or more of these attributes needs to be highlighted:
Different articulations (staccato, legato, etc.)
Different registers
Dynamic variations (ppp through fff)
Variations in tempo
Varied attributes (micro-modulations) (e.g. non vibrato/smooth vibrato/molto vibrato, grain, sul tasto/sul ponticello, bow pressure changes, etc)
THE AWARD
The winner** will be selected for recording and analysis by a jury consisting of members of the ODESSA IV research team. A commission of $1400 CAD will be awarded to the winner. As well, the top five compositions will be selected for a concert performance at an ACTOR partner institution (Winter/Summer 2022 or 2022/23 school year) and a live recording.
SUBMISSION PROCESS
Please submit an anonymized score with a pseudonym on this form.
Deadline for the Call for Scores: 11:59 EDT, November 1st, 2021
Winners announced: November 22nd, 2021
Parts for the winning score due: November 29th, 2021
Read more
* Under SSHRC guidelines, postdocs are eligible to apply as well.
** The jury reserves the right to choose a second and third place winner(s), if the composition(s) demonstrate a quality that would be helpful for the recording session and experiments. These runners-up will be given a monetary prize/commission as well, the
The SFAM / Musurgia journal's article competition 2021
On the initiative of the French Society for Music Analysis (SFAM), the Musurgia journal is organising an article competition with two financial prizes:
The Jean-Jacques Nattiez prize (1000 €) will be awarded for an article written in French by a young researcher (up to 35 years old or having defended their PhD thesis within the last 5 years).
The SFAM prize (1000 €) will be awarded for an article related to the work and/or the fields of interest of the researcher, analyst and theorist Annie Labussière, who died on 25 February 2021. The article may be written in French or in English.