Newsletter no. 41
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Newsletter no. 41
September, 2024
EDITOR'S NOTE
Dear ACTOR Community,
We are happy to be back after the summer break and we hope that the estival pause was restful for all of you. As we enter our last year of activities, we want to thank you for your continuous engagement and encourage you on your future work! The ACTOR community has grown much over the past years and we wish to keep this momentum going so that we can leave a long-lasting mark in the world of timbre and orchestration research and practice. We still have one more full year of activities and there is yet much to do from our part!
Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez
ACTOR Newsletter Editor
ACTOR OUTCOMES
New research involving ACTOR members has been published.
Saitis, C., & Wallmark, Z. (2024). Timbral brightness perception investigated through multimodal interference. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02934-2
Check out composer Jorge Ramos latest publication in which he presents and talks about his piece Paysage (2021) for fixed media composed during the pandemic.
For the full bibliography, please visit ACTOR publications.
UPCOMING EVENTS
The Art and Science of Contemporary Orchestration
9 October
Biblioteca dell’Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee
Venice, Italy
On October 9th Robert Hasegawa, and Moe Touizrar, will participate in a round table organized by Ingrid Pusijanac entitled THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CONTEMPORARY ORCHESTRATION held at the Biblioteca dell’Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee – ASAC RICERCARE in Venice, Italy.
The large symphony orchestra seen as an organism in which each part contributes to the perfection of the whole is often used as a metaphor in the most diverse contexts. This organism made up of individuals, skills, instruments and colours, which has been offering listeners unique musical experiences and emotions for centuries, will be at the heart of this reflection coordinated by theorist and musicologist Ingrid Pustijanac (University of Pavia). The presentation will highlight aspects of contemporary orchestration research stemming from the important multi-year research project ACTOR - Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration, coordinated by the music psychologist Stephen McAdams (McGill University). This project involves numerous international institutions and includes many of the participants in this round table as collaborators.
Robert Hasegawa (McGill University), theorist, composer and musicologist, will introduce the various lines of research of this highly interdisciplinary project that includes the fields of composition, musicology, theory and analysis, acoustics, psychoacoustics, music psychology, computer science, semantics and ethnomusicology. Thanks to this richness of perspectives, approaches to contemporary orchestration that integrate data from disciplines such as acoustics, psychoacoustics and computer science will be introduced.
Thanks to the intervention of Moe Touizrar (University of Toronto, University of Helsinki), musicologist and composer, an expert in the fields of orchestration analysis and perception research, the audience will be able to learn about recent interdisciplinary collaborations between scientists, humanists and artists that feed the increasingly wide-ranging field of contemporary orchestration research. One example of this research examines the concepts of spatiality and luminosity, concepts in which scientific theories of perception and aesthetic and expressive dimensions of contemporary orchestral repertoire intersect.
Considering the union between science and art, one cannot overlook the enormous advances in the field of computer music and computer-assisted composition that focus precisely on orchestration. Daniele Ghisi, researcher and composer (Conservatory of Turin), will illustrate recent achievements in the field of computer-assisted orchestration from the initial project (Orchidée by G. Carpentier) to current target-based orchestration practices (Orchidea by C. Cella), up to a recent paradigm shift that moves away from target-based practices, addressing the problem of enhancing or reducing ‘orchestral qualities’ – similarly to what a commercial plugin would do for sound quality in a digital audio workstation (DAW). This analogy is even more relevant given the way orchestration is often handled by contemporary composers, no longer in terms of the art of blending instruments, but rather the art of mixing sounds: the DAW becomes a sort of virtual writing desk, on which combinations can be studied and simulated before being transferred to paper and entrusted to an instrumental ensemble. This confirms the centrality of sound in all its complex facets, sound understood as a place of production of meaning and a place of expression of the relationship between a composer and his audience.
The talk by musicologist Makis Solomos (Université Paris 8) will be devoted to the numerous implications of this paradigm shift for contemporary orchestral production in relationship with ecological thought. Questions to be addressed include the possibility of thinking of orchestration as a means of production guided by an ecological awareness, and thus marked by the environmental impact that an instrumental ensemble exerts when it is used for the production of music. A useful tool for working with such concepts will be the map offered by Félix Guattari through his ‘three ecologies’ (environmental, social and mental ecology). Issues central to the programming and production of contemporary orchestral music will be considered in relation to the sharing and accessibility aspects (social ecology) of the means of production, as well as by conceptualizing orchestration as the development of new imaginaries (mental ecology).
During the panel discussion, numerous examples from orchestral works by the composers featured in the Biennale 2024 program will be provided to bring theoretical observations into the musical reality experienced by the festival audience, creating an interactive space for discussion and sharing of experiences.
ACTOR BUSINESS
OrchARD - New data model
The new data model corresponding to the Taxonomy of Orchestratlon Grouping Effects published in Music Theory Online by S. McAdams, M. Goodchild & K. Soden has now been implemented in a new version of the Orchestration Analysis and Research Database (OrchARD) by the computer scientist Alfa Barri. A new feature is also the ability to upload validated analysis files annotated in OrchView (xml of annotations and corresponding annotated score pages and audio clips from the reference recording). Original analyses from the first data model have been migrated to the new model, but the same annotated pdf files are still displayed.
Workgroups
Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Following up on the enthusiastic discussion at the first meeting of the workgroup at the ACTOR Y6 Workshop, the Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodologies Workgroup will host a meeting to continue the discussion around interdisciplinarity, methodology, and epistemology, and what interdisciplinarity means for ACTOR. We will also discuss and organize future activities for the workgroup.
Please sign up at this link by September 12th at 5 pm EDT, indicating 1) your name and 2) your email in the “comments” field, and we will email respondents with the chosen date and time soon after. Given that the interest expressed at the Y6 Workshop from ACTOR members spans many time zones, we have selected times that work for a wide variety of geographic regions.
Please write to us moe.touizrar[at]utoronto.ca if you would like to be part of the email list, and we will keep you updated with our activities. If you would prefer not to submit your email on the scheduling form, please write to Moe to share your contact info.
Sincerely,
Moe, Jason, and Rebecca
ACTOR Y6 Workshop
Last July, from the 15th through the 17th, ACTOR's Acting Director Robert Hasegawa welcomed members to the Y6 Workshop, which concluded the sixth year of activities of the project. Involving approximately 40 participants in person and 15 virtually, via Zoom, the event was warmly hosted by our fellow ACTORians at the University of British Columbia.
The weather was just perfect and we all enjoyed walking around UBC's beautiful campus while discussing our projects. We were thrilled to see our colleagues again, exchange ideas about new collaborations, and plan the future of ACTOR (as well as all its potential new acronyms!). Twelve workgroup sessions were organized, including an insightful roundtable discussion organized by our host, which was followed by a wonderful concert featuring compositions by our very own Bob Pritchard and Keith Hamel, as well as by Patrick Carrabré.
The annual workshop included the first meeting of the newly formed Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodology Workgroup, Timbre in Afrological Music Workgroup, and Orchestration Pedagogy Workgroup, as well as five selected student presentations, five lightning talks, and two collaborative student grant reports. During the administrative session, we had a chance to hear brief reports from the Project's Acting Director, the Training and Mentoring Committee, the Knowledge Mobilization Committee, the Diversity Committee, and the Timbre and Orchestration Resource's editor Kit Soden. The three newly-elected student representatives were introduced and the fourth edition of the Mentorship Program was launched. We all got to see first-hand the new promotional video being developed under the supervision of post-doc Andrés Gutiérrez where several members talk about their favourite orchestrated moment in history.
We would like to thank all workgroup leaders for the time invested in the organization of each session, our students for their assistance in many areas, and our hosts and co-organizers of this event Keith Hamel, Leigh VanHandel, and Michael Tenzer. 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 again next year!
TOSS 2024
From July 12th to 15th, the second Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS) took place in Vancouver, B.C., organized by ACTOR postdocs Ben Duinker, Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, and ACTOR collaborator and UdeM postdoc Kit Soden. The summer school was hosted by the University of British Columbia and was held in the days leading to the ACTOR Y6 Workshop. For three days and a half, a diverse cohort of 43 students and 3 auditors from a variety of academic institutions, as well as independent researchers and practitioners from North America and Europe, met at the UBC school of music to learn about timbre and orchestration research and practice from leading voices in the field: Emily Dolan, Daphne Tan, Caroline Traube, Anthony Tan, and Michael Tenzer. The valuable discussions and the exchange between peers and experts is what makes this event unique in its kind.
As part of the organizing committee of the summer school, we are very proud of this accomplishment, and we are very thankful to the tutors involved and to everyone who supported the event along the way. We are currently discussing the next iteration of the summer school in the foreseeable future because we are convinced that it is an important formative workshop for young research scholars and music practitioners.
