ACTOR OUTCOMES | UPCOMING EVENTS | ACTOR BUSINESS | MEMBERS SPOTLIGHT | FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

ACTOR OUTCOMES

Editor’s Note

Dear ACTOR Members,

As the year draws to a close, we extend our warmest wishes for a joyful winter holiday season and all the best for the New Year. Please note that the newsletter will resume in February, but we encourage you to continue sharing your activities with us during this time. We are always delighted to highlight news and initiatives from our members, fostering connection and inspiration within our community.

Thank you for your ongoing support and engagement. We look forward to staying connected and sharing more of your achievements in the coming year.

Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez

ACTOR Newsletter Editor

Creations & Productions

“Keep Up!” by Jorge Ramos

Last Wednesday, the saxophonist Ricardo Pires performed the UK premiere of ACTOR Collaborator Jorge Ramos's Keep Up! at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama as part of Saxophone XXI: Portuguese Music for Saxophone. Read more

**The fNIRS cap and music making**

In September 2024, ACTOR Collaborator **Juanita Marchand Knight** visited the NRIx headquarters in Berlin and sang arias by Wagner and Puccini while wearing a fNIRS cap. The cap is totally portable and can be worn anywhere to study brain activity during music making. Check out the Youtube links to see what it's like! If you would like to know more about how you can use fNIRS in your research, reach out to Jay to chat.
https://youtube.com/shorts/8816nvzDaeY?si=OJ5o9AzZ3KhjhQbh
https://youtube.com/shorts/Hb1BZQRCxKU?si=61WJHrmLa-vKHwrj

**“…for narrow is the door…” by Quentin Lauvray**

ACTOR Student member **Quentin Lauvray**'s piece *...for narrow is the door...*, for violin, bass clarinet, trombone and vibraphone, was perfromed by Ensemble Éclat on December 5, 2024 at 6PM, at Espace Orange (Edifice Wilder, Montréal, Canada). The piece was composed for the CORE Round I in 2019-20.
Ensemble Éclat's participation was part of an "événement bénéfice" for Groupe Le Vivier. Read more

Publications

New research involving ACTOR members has been published.

**Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures**

**Stephen McAdams**' book *Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures* has just been published by Oxford University Press. This is the updated and revised English translation of *Perception et cognition de la musique : Les conférences Alphonse Dupront* originally published in 2015. The content is based on distinguished lectures delivered at Sorbonne Université in 2008 and the Université de Montréal in 2009. Read more

Presentations

Joint Session - SMT 2024

The Timbre and Orchestration Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory, co-chaired by Lindsey Reymore, held a joint session at SMT 2024 with the Analysis of World Musics Interest Group. Annie Liu led an interactive listening session, titled "Timbre in Translation: Applying Chinese Timbre Semantic Descriptors to Shidaiqu."

UPCOMING EVENTS

Timbre Geeks Networking Event (TGN)

9 December | 1:00pm
Online - Zoom

ACTOR's Training and Mentoring Committee is pleased to announce our annual Timbre Geeks Networking (TGN) event, which will be held online on January 17, 2025, 12h-14h EST.

We invite any ACTOR student who is interested in applying for the Y7 Student Presentation Award (https://www.actorproject.org/funding/student-workshop-presentations) to deliver a 2–3 minute lightning talk on their proposed project. Fellow ACTOR students and members of TMC will offer feedback on each talk in service of helping students develop competitive proposals for the Y7 presentation award.

Students who wish to apply for the Y7 Presentation Awards are required to present a lightning talk at this TGN event. If you cannot attend the TGN event but still wish to apply for the Y7 awards, you can submit a video of your talk in advance. If this scenario applies to you, please contact ACTOR Postdoc Andrés Gutiérrez (andres.gutierrezmartinez@mail.mcgill.ca) to arrange submission of your video.

NOTE: students will not be evaluated for their Y7 presentation awards proposals via this lightning talk, which is for training and development purposes only.

All are welcome, but registration is required if you wish to present.

Registration link:

https://airtable.com/app8gRjxBogIgqZsH/shr4mPgdAELOpI7vI

Zoom link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82897961766?pwd=sL67TJitTMOaFW7zp2bJcaQXuqdfvj.1

Meeting ID: 828 9796 1766

Passcode: 840972

Timbre Semantics Workgroup Meeting

9 December | 1:00pm EST
Online – Zoom

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be meeting on Monday, December 09 at 1pm Eastern time on Zoom: Zoom_Timbre-Semantics.url. We would like to have a general meeting with updates and discussion—all who are interested or intrigued are welcome—no prior involvement with any initiative is necessary. We will also have the opportunity to connect and share research updates, ideas, etc.

ACTOR BUSINESS

Workshop

Y7 Workshop

It is official! We are pleased to confirm that the Y7 workshop will take place at the Haute école de musique in Geneva, Switzerland, 7-9 July 2025. More details will be available soon.

If you are interested in participating in this final event of ACTOR and have not yet responded to our survey, please do so at your earliest convenience.

https://forms.office.com/r/r63mFcjUvG

*Institutional representatives who have already been contacted do not need to respond.

We hope to see as many of you as possible at the closing of this 7-year journey!

Diversity Workgroup

In their meeting held October 1st, 2024, ACTOR Central Committee decided, for the purposes of the remaining months of ACTOR’s tenure, to combine the activities of the Diversity Workgroup (in operation since 2021) and the Diversity Committee (in operation since 2023) into a single entity, henceforth the Diversity Committee.

We came to this decision because:

Many of the projects presently organized under the auspices of the diversity workgroup, such as the Lei Liang analysis project (led by Linglan Zhu) and the TiPS project (led by Nicole Biamonte and Lindsey Reymore) simply make more sense in other places, namely the Analysis Workgroup;
One of the most prolific arms of the workgroup, the Sub-Saharan Africa and Afrodiasporic subgroup, became its own workgroup in 2024; and
The optics of “othering” research projects that do not focus on Eurocentric musical traditions under the banner of “diversity” are counterproductive and harmful.

Given that all projects under the (now) former Diversity Workgroup are now organized elsewhere, the Diversity Committee remains committed to focusing on initiatives and services for ACTOR members, and an incubator for ideas and policies that might be useful in ACTOR’s possible successor grant.

This means that there will be no Diversity Workgroup meeting at the Y7 workshop, instead replaced by a Diversity Committee Report delivered at Y7’s plenary session.

Any questions regarding this reorganization can be directed toward Ben Duinker (benjamin.duinker@mail.mcgill.ca) or Robert Hasegawa (Robert.hasegawa@mcgill.ca)

MEMBERS SPOTLIGHT

Keith Hamel

Keith Hamel is a Professor of Composition and a researcher in Music Technology in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada. He has been a professor at UBC for 38 years and will be retiring from UBC at the end of this academic year. Keith Hamel holds degrees from Queen’s University, Harvard University, and he studied Computer Music with Barry Vercoe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a composer, Keith Hamel has written works for many of the finest ensembles and performers in Canada and abroad and he has received many performances of his compositions all over the world. Many of Keith Hamel’s recent compositions are focused on creating interactive audio-visual environments where performers can control a multimedia environment using sound from their instrument and physical actions. Using software environments such as MaxMSP for interactive sound and Unity for interactive visuals, along with motion tracking systems, Keith Hamel’s compositions explore new modes of creative expression, and they explore new ways in which performers can interact with their performance environment. To control these complex live performance situations, Keith Hamel has designed music notation software—NoteAbilityPro—which can be used for creating complex music scores, for controlling and synchronizing multimedia events, and for facilitating score-following of the live performers in situations where this is needed. While Keith Hamel has worked with many different performers, he has collaborated most closely with pianist Megumi Masaki who has commissioned five interactive works from him. Masaki and Hamel have performed these works dozens of times across Canada, and in the US, Europe and Asia.

Keith Hamel’s compositions and research have been funded by the Canada Council, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, SSHRC, a Killam Research Fellowship, and UBC Arts-ISIT. Keith Hamel has served as Vice-President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), as President of the Canadian Music Centre, and on the boards of the Canadian League of Composers and Vancouver New Music. Recordings of his music are available on the Centrediscs and Redshift labels. Keith Hamel has been an active member of ACTOR since its inception in 2018.

Jason Noble

Jason Noble is a composer and researcher whose work focuses on meaning in contemporary music. He is an Assistant Professor at the Université de Moncton. Previously, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université de Montréal, funded by FRQSC, and he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the ACTOR project. His PhD from McGill University was funded by the prestigious Vanier Scholarship (SSHRC).

Jason’s research appears in Music Perception, Music Theory Online, Journal of New Music Research, Organised Sound, and the Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, and he has presented at numerous national and international conferences and invited guest lectures. His research interests include timbre semantics, timbre-based composition, musical temporalities and timelessness, musical narrativity, phonetics and speech transcription in music, instrument-specific tuning systems, nonlinear musical notation, perceptual and semantic aspects of sound mass music, outreach to young people and general audiences through contemporary music, and, most recently, relationships between musical gamification, accessibility, and wellness.

Jason’s compositions have been performed across Canada, USA, Mexico, Argentina, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, and featured in numerous publications and broadcasts. His compositional work seeks a balance between innovation and accessibility, motivated by a belief that contemporary music can be genuinely progressive and communicative at the same time.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

Student Presentation Funding

We are pleased to inform you that the Y7 Student Presentation Funding has been confirmed. Given that ACTOR's funds are essentially depleted, the Haute école de musique has graciously agreed to fund travel and lodging for students selected by the Training and Mentoring Committee to present their research at the Y7 Workshop. However, students selected might not all be funded. Funding will be disbursed following the ranking of applications until depletion. Students not funded will be invited to present virtually via Zoom.

The event will be held in a hybrid format (in-person/online) at the Haute école de musique de Genève (HEM), Switzerland, 7-9 July 2025.

Note that the deadline to submit applications is exceptionally on 1 February at 5:00pm (EST).

You can present on any aspect of your research related to timbre and/or orchestration, and work from all fields is welcome (e.g. theory, musicology, composition, psychology, etc, etc). If selected, the presentation can function as a conference presentation on your CV. It’s an especially great opportunity to share your work and interests with everyone in ACTOR and get great support, ideas, and feedback.

To help you with your proposal, we’re organizing an event dedicated to providing students with feedback. This event is called TGN (Timbre Geeks Networking) and will take place on January 17, 12:00-2:00pm (EST) on Zoom. Note that attending the TGN will be a requirement for those interested in applying for the Student Presentation Funding. Registration is mandatory and can be completed by January 10 via the link: TGN Registration

For the complete eligibility information and to access the application form, visit ACTOR Student Presentations.

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