Newsletter no. 4
Editor’s Note
Bonjour, all! As we move toward the end of 2020, ACTOR members have been hard at work with both research and creation as well as administrative organization. We are happy to announce the new Executive, Knowledge Mobilization (KMC), and Training and Mentoring (TMC) committees as well as to share the results of the September ACTOR strategic funding grants.
Thanks to all those submitting newsletter updates! Due to an oversight on the part of the newsletter team, Malte Kob’s updates were not included in the last newsletter, but those updates are included here. We’ll be continuing to put out monthly-ish newsletters, so please keep your updates coming! All updates must be submitted via the website by the last day of each month. However, exceptionally our next deadline is January 31 to give everyone a break over the much-needed holiday season.
Thank you for reading! We look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Best,
Lindsey Reymore, ACTOR Analysis Postdoc
ACTOR Staff Changes
Dear ACTORians,
It is with mixed regret and delight that I have some big news to announce to you. The regretful part is that Juanita Marchand Knight, our fearless Project Coordinator since the beginning of the ACTOR adventure, will be leaving us at the end of this year to pursue further graduate studies at Concordia University. (That's one delightful part for Juanita!) They have been essential to ACTOR not only in managing all of our administrative and organizational affairs, but also in stimulating new avenues of research within the ACTOR Partnership such as equity and diversity and also getting more reflection on the musical voice. We will miss Juanita dearly, but rumours abound that they are considering independent collaborator status within ACTOR. At any rate, I'm sure you will all join me in wishing Juanita great success in their future endeavours. And hopefully some of them will overlap with those of ACTOR.
Now to the delight. I am very pleased to announce that André Martins de Oliveira is already working alongside Juanita to make the transition to being our new Project Coordinator as of December 21st. André brings many musical and organizational talents to this position with a background in flute performance and music education, administrative duties in a university music school, the management of music pedagogy operations, and more recently he was the Events Coordinator for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT). This panoply of skills and interests will certainly benefit the ACTOR community. Please join me in welcoming André to the ACTOR community.
Stephen McAdams
Strategic and Research-Creation Projects
September 2020 round
Nine proposals were received (6 research-creation and 3 strategic projects) and were evaluated by a jury consisting of Géraldine Aliberti, Keith Hamel, Stephen McAdams, Gilbert Nouno, and Lindsey Reymore. Evaluators were recused for proposals with participants from their own institution and none of them was involved in any proposal. The evaluation criteria used included quality of the project, potential for training, benefit for ACTOR, budget justification, feasibility of the timeline. With $6,000 more than the money originally allocated to this expenditure, we were able to fund seven of the nine projects for a total of $41,000. The funded projects are listed below. We look forward to more submissions for the next round of funding: due date 15 March 2021.
https://www.actorproject.org/form/research-creation-funding-application
https://www.actorproject.org/form/strategic-project-funding-application
Strategic Projects
• Martha de Francisco (McGill University) [PI] with Michael Sandner (Detmold University of Music) and external collaborators Andrew Grey (Voces Boreales), David Cronkite (Voces Boreales), and Margaret Tobin (Dolby Digital). "Path of miracles—A multitrack recording in 3D audio to recreate choral blend during the pandemic." $4,000
• Malte Kob (Detmold University of Music) [PI] with Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Fabien Lévy (Hochschule für Musik une Theater Leipzig), Kit Soden (McGill University), and Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal). "Online guide to room acoustics for musicians." $4,000
• Zachary Wallmark (University of Oregon) [PI] with Charalampos Saitis (Queen Mary University of London). "Metaphors we listen with: Neural correlates of timbral brightness investigated by pitch-timbre interference and fMRI." $8,000
Research-Creation Projects
• Robert Hasegawa (McGill University) [PI] with Jimmie Leblanc (Université de Montréal) and external collaborators the Quatuor Bozzini (Isabelle Bozzini, Stéphanie Bozzini, Alissa Cheung, Clemens Merkel). "Orchestration for the String Quartet: Workshop and Concert with the Quatuor Bozzini" $8,000
• Malte Kob (Detmold University of Music) [PI] with Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal), Jean-François Rivest (Université de Montréal), and Michael Sandner (Detmold University of Music). "ODESSA IV: New orchestra recordings – measurements – systematic analysis." $5,000
• Pierre Michel (Université de Strasbourg) [PI] with Philippe Lalitte (Université Paris Sorbonne) and ACTOR student member Nicolas Medero Larrosa (Université de Strasbourg/Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin). "The hybrid space in music composition: The use of tactile transduction devices to develop new interactions between the acoustic instrument and the electronic." $4,000
• Shahrokh Yadegari (University of California, San Diego) [PI] with ACTOR student members Jeanne Côté (McGill University), Pedram Diba (McGill University), Min Seok Peter Ko (UCSD), Sang Song (UCSD), Berk Schneider (UCSD), and Tiange Zhou (UCSD) plus external collaborator Florian Grond (McGill University). "Musicians Auditory Perception (MAP) Project." $8,000
Working Groups
Two new ACTOR working groups have been founded this past semester: the Diversity Working Group and the Voice Working Group. The Diversity group encompasses three sub-groups: Women and Gender-Diverse Composers, East Asian and Cross-Cultural Musics, Timbre and Orchestration in Popular Musics. If you are interested in the Diversity group, contact Bob Hasegawa or Juanita Marchand Knight. The Voice Group is currently developing ideas for projects. If you are working on anything voice-related and would like more information about this group, contact Juanita Marchand Knight.
Committees
A big thank you to our outgoing committee chairs Malte Kob and Jason Noble (Training & Mentoring Committee) and Zachary Wallmark (Knowledge Mobilization Committee) as well as outgoing committee members Aristotelis Hadjakos, Géraldine Aliberti, and Julie Delisle (Executive Committee); Philippe Depalle, Shahrokh Yadegari, and Dorothea Lincke (TMC); François-Xavier Dupas, and Iza Korsmit (KMC). Our new committees are (all elected members were by acclamation):
ACTOR Executive Committee
Stephen McAdams, project director and axis 1 lead (ex officio), chair
Bob Hasegawa, associate project director and axis 3 leader (ex officio)
Philippe Esling, axis 2 leader (ex officio)
Malte Kob, academic representative (elected)
Caroline Traube, academic representative (elected)
Indiana Wollman, private/cultural sector representative (elected)
Nathalie Hérold, TMC coordinator (ex officio)
Catherine Guastavino, KMC coordinator (ex officio)
Lindsey Reymore, ACTOR post-doc (ex officio)
Yuval Adler, student representative (elected)
Juanita Marchand Knight, project coordinator (ex-officio), secretary [until 21 December]
Andre Martins de Oliveira, project coordinator (ex-officio), secretary [from 21 December]
ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee
Nathalie Hérold, co-chair and coordinator (elected)
Matthew Zeller, ACTOR post-doc and co-chair (ex officio)
Charalampos Saitis, ACTOR member (elected)
Jimmie Leblanc, ACTOR member (elected)
Jonas Régnier, student representative (elected)
Kit Soden, ACTOR Webmaster (ex officio)
ACTOR Knowledge Mobilization Committee
Catherine Guastavino, chair and coordinator (elected)
Laurie Radford, ACTOR member (elected)
Gilbert Nouno, ACTOR member (elected)
Joshua Rosner, student representative (elected)
Lindsey Reymore, newsletter editor (ex-officio)
Kit Soden, ACTOR Webmaster (ex officio)
Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR)
As you all know, I am currently building various branches of the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR). One of the goals this year is to create a wide ranging resource linking to information about each of the instruments of the orchestra. I created a template page showing some of the possible topics: https://www.actorproject.org/tor/cello-template-page. If you have original research you would like to contribute to the site, in the form of new webpages you would like to see created to share this research or as links to websites where this research is already published, please contact me at actor-webmaster.music@mcgill.ca. As well, please feel free to contribute links to websites you believe would be important to link to; I post these as "recommended external content."
All the best from Montreal, and stay safe and healthy,
Kit Soden
As a reminder, we welcome ACTOR member contributions to two of our blog series, Amazing Moments in Timbre and Timbre Lingo! If you have an idea for a blog post or would like to write one yourself, contact Kit Soden. Two new blog posts are up since last newsletter:
Publications
Muriel Boulan, Christophe, Guillotel-Nothmann & Nathalie Hérold (eds.), Musurgia XXVI/3-4 (2019), “Numéro spécial à l'occasion des 25 ans de la revue Musurgia/Special Issue to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Musurgia Journal.” https://www.cairn.info/revue-musurgia-2019-3.htm
de Francisco, M., Kob, M., Rivest, J-F., Traube, C. (2019). ODESSA - Orchestral Distribution Effects in Sound, Space and Acoustics: an interdisciplinary symphonic recording for the study of orchestral sound blending. Proc. International Symposium on Music Acoustics 2019 - ISMA 2019. http://pub.dega-akustik.de/ISMA2019/data/index.html
Gari, S.A., Kob, M., & Lokki, T. (2019). Analysis of trumpet performance adjustments due to room acoustics. International Symposium on Room Acoustics.
Grothe, T., & Kob, M. (2019). High resolution 3D radiation measurements on the bassoon. Proc. International Symposium on Music Acoustics 2019 - ISMA 2019. http://pub.dega-akustik.de/ISMA2019/data/index.html
Ioannou, S., & Kob, M. (2019). Investigation of the Blending of Sound in a String Ensemble. Proc. International Symposium on Music Acoustics 2019 - ISMA 2019. http://pub.dega-akustik.de/ISMA2019/data/index.html
Kob, M., & Baskind, A. (2019). Impact of free field inhomogenity on directivity measurements due to the measurement set-up. Proc. International Symposium on Music Acoustics 2019 - ISMA 2019. http://pub.dega-akustik.de/ISMA2019/data/index.html
Reymore, L. and Hansen, N.C. A theory of instrument-specific absolute pitch. Frontiers in Psychology, 11:560877. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.560877
Saitis, C., & Siedenburg, K. (2020). Brightness perception for musical instrument sounds: Relation to timbre dissimilarity and source-cause categories. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(4), 2256-2266. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0002275
Conferences
Malte Kob organized the International Symposium on Music Acoustics (http://www.isma2019.de), which took place in September 2019 in Detmold, Germany. Read more about the project here, and/or check out this brief video. Malte also contributed to the 2nd annual meeting of ACTOR in the workshop "Acoustics of Musical Performance Rooms," including a presentation "Short introduction into the meaning and application of acoustic methods" In the coming months, Malte will be giving talks and sessions at the Beethoven-Symposium in October 2020, the Forum Acusticum in December 2020, DAGA in 2021, Physik trifft Musik (Hybrid Workshop) in 2021, and Vienna Talk 2021. He will also be contributing talks related to the ODESSA project with Martha de Fransisco at the conference for the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in 2020.
Awards & Honours
Jorge Ramos was awarded the Dart Award by the Royal Music Association in the UK towards funding the composition of his newest work for String Quartet and Electronics.
Zachary Wallmark's co-edited volume The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (with Robert Fink and Melinda Latour; Oxford, 2018) was selected as a finalist for the Society of Music Theory (SMT) Outstanding Multi-Authored Collection Award.
Creative Output
Eliot Britton
Commission for distanced chamber orchestra. This work uses machine learning to integrate macro and micro scale audiovisual materials. The orchestration embraces a remote recording aesthetic, seeking ways to exploit timbral opportunities unique to distanced performances. The project examines extreme magnification, both visually and sonically. The 50th Anniversary Commissioning Series for New Music Concerts Canada. https://www.newmusicconcerts.com/
December 6th 2020: 7:15 Pre concert chat; Concert at 8:00.
Guillaume Bourgogne
Release of CD "Cleopatra's Songs" - Works by Agata Zubel. Ensemble Intercontemporain. Kairos Music
Streaming of "Rouages" with Ensemble Court-Circuit. "Cinemaolio" by Francesca Verunelli and "Cassation" by Gérard Pesson
Jorge Ramos
A recording of “Point of Departure,” premiered last September by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and shared on the last Newsletter, is now available here. This work was realized with the assistance of the new Orchidea Computer-Assisted Orchestration Software.
My work “hidden gem” for vibraphone solo by Sergio Yraita from Ensamble NEO in Buenos Aires, Argentina was premiered on the 21st of November 2020. Link for the programme notes and recording: https://www.jorgefpramos.com/hidden-gem
“Plug-in” for mixed quartet was chosen for the project Das Tripas Coração! Project by the Cat's Cradle Collective Ensemble in London. This work will be premiered live at the Radio Portuguesa UK on Thursday, 3rd December at 3 pm.
I had the pleasure of being invited to write all the music material for the European Capital of Culture 2027 Application by the City of Braga in Portugal. This was a virtual-event on the 27th of November 2020 at 21:30h Lisbon/London Time. Website for the event: https://27.pt
Project Updates
Current & future activities within the VRACE project related to ACTOR
ACTOR student member Jithin Thilakan and Detmold student Otavio Gomes are enrolled in the doctoral program “Music Acoustics” (URL:https://www.hfm-detmold.de/musicacoustics) of Detmold University of Music since 2019. They both exchange research and workplaces within the frame of the European Marie Curie Training Network (ITN) “VRACE – Virtual Reality Audio for Cyber Environments” (URL:https://vrace-etn.eu) as early stage researchers (ESR) at the company Müller BBM (supervisors: Dr.-Ing. Eckard Mommertz, Dr.-Ing. Winfried Lachenmayr) and Detmold University of Music (Dr.-Ing. Malte Kob).
“Estimation of blending parameter value,” Jithin Thilakan
Blending between musical instruments is an important attribute in orchestral performance. It is observed that the blending at source level is a sonic feature that varies with not one, but a group of parameters. A listening test was conducted among the ear trained Tonmeister students and musicians to rate the degree of blending of sound samples which included multiple violins that play together and recorded using spot microphones. Based upon the acoustic descriptors, a statistical model is currently under development to estimate a time-varying single-valued blending parameter between the individual dry source signals (having no influence of room acoustics) that fits the listener's impression. This can be used as a helpful tool in orchestral recording process, replication of sound sources from a single one to create a blended orchestra in auralisation, etc.
Although the blending at the source level is known, it can be changed at the listener's impression due to the influence of room acoustic factors. Considering this into account, a more generic approach would be to estimate the degree of blending of the resulting orchestral sound by incorporating the influence of the room acoustic. Hence this investigation would be extended to the estimation of blending parameter from monaural/binaural signals.
“Reconstruction of orchestral sound in virtual space and estimation of the quality requirements,” Jithin Thilakan and Otavio Gomes
A string ensemble with 9 violins performed at the Detmold concert house will be recreated using virtual sound field control methods (ODEON, RAVEN, EASE, WFS) and the resulting sound field of the orchestra will be evaluated by comparing them to the real measurements using perceptual tests and signal processing methods to determine the quality requirements needed for virtual musical performance.
By simulating the concert house with matching room parameters, the orchestra is auralised using spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) rendered by ODEON. A wave field synthesis system implemented in the concert house is also used to recreate the ensemble by using the dry signals of violin recorded with spot microphones. Other acoustic simulation software such as RAVEN, and EASE will also be used for the auralisation of the orchestral sound using the same room simulation. The resultant sound fields will be compared to evaluate their quality of perceptual impression.
“Categorization of the influence of room acoustic parameters on blending,” Jithin Thilakan and Otavio Gomes
While considering the impact of room acoustics on the orchestral sounding, it is observed that the individual room acoustic factors contribute differently to the blending of musical instruments. Using the simulated environments of various performance spaces, the room acoustic factors are varied individually in a controlled manner and an ensemble was auralised to investigate their individual contributions in the impression of blending. The influence of various parameters such as: spatial positions of musicians, the spectral coloration of ensemble sound by the room, the direct, early and late reflection strengths and their directions, would be investigated individually using perceptual evaluations.
Report from Roger Reynolds at UC San Diego
During the Fall Quarter, I have been involved with a Seminar entitled “Foundations of Innovation When Composing or Performing.” I was the primary instructor, and was joined for several sessions by Miller Puckette, who discussed the possible impact of digital signal processing, and Shahrokh Yadegari, who did the same for spatialization prospects.
This Seminar is devoted to very careful listening and discussion of three kinds of materials: the “timbre études” composed by 11 grad. composers during the 2019-20 academic year, other new works proposed by grads who were not in last year’s 2-quarter 206 sequence, and works that interested performers submit which they have already or are planning to perform (including involvement as members of last year’s “Composer-Performer Orchestration Research Ensemble”) The discussion will take place with the aid of a particular “vocabulary” of psychoacoustic, cognitive, and evaluative terminology that has proved useful in the shaping and consideration of complex musical experience.
There are nine graduate students enrolled with several observers. Our sessions have been notably intense, with meaningful contributions from all. Our intention is to present in December, to, as it were, “ACTOR-Central” a report that will reshape and redefine the three categories of terminology that we have found particularly useful in our discussions, as well as comments on three other issues:
- Expanding the size of the CORE ensemble for the next set of Etudes (2021-22)
- Prospects for a spatialization dimension in this next round of CORE activity
- Prospects for a signal processing component of the next round of CORE activity
I would emphasize again that, from my perspective, the focus on not only attentive listening and discussion, but the concentration, accuracy, and parsimoniousness of same allowed by shared terminological resources was of striking value.
CORE Text Analysis
Over the summer, Justine Maillard used the NVivo software to perform exploratory analyses on the interviews conducted with composers and performers at the beginning of the 2019 CORE project at Universite de Montreal and McGill. Initial results were disseminated at the ACTOR Y2 workshop and will be accessible through an upcoming module in the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR) online. CORE text analysis meetings and general CORE analysis meetings will be held in mid-December; to join these meetings, members should contact Bob Hasegawa.