For five days, an international cohort of 55 students from a variety of academic institutions across Europe and North America as well as independent researchers and practitioners, met at the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation to learn from leading voices in Timbre research about the multifaceted field of timbre research as it pertains to orchestration. The first two days of the summer school presented tutorials on several topics pertaining to timbre and orchestration from very different perspectives, the following three days were connected to the TIMBRE 2023 conference.

In this project update I will describe how I incorporate OrchPlay in my research project. It contains the outcome from research activities that have been conducted during my ACTOR exchange at the McGill University’s Music Perception and Cognition Lab as well as follow up implementations in the Music Perception and Processing Lab at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, up until now. I plan to follow up with a series of updates on this project in the future.

In the Fall of 2022, I co-taught a seminar on the ACTOR project with Rand Steiger. There were seven UCSD grad students enrolled in the seminar. The group also included ACTOR visitor Yuval Adler, who participated energetically and usefully, while also undertaking archival responsibilities. Five of those enrolled composed “Timbre Etudes” for the specified septet of instruments for the CORE project.

Website update

Hello everyone! I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of you in the ACTOR community already, but to those for whom I’m a new name or face, I’m Ben Duinker, one of the two new ACTOR postdocs (2022–2024).

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our fourth year of activities. As we transition back to some form of normal life again, many of the collaborative workgroups have been very active, demonstrating once again the resourcefulness and devotion of our community to our common passion.

The aim of their project is to evaluate musical blend in choral performance from both signal and perceptual analysis methods. They will analyze choral blend on two levels: at the sound source level and the room acoustic level. The influence of feedback from the acoustic environment—along with coordinated performance strategies between musicians—is observed to have a high impact on individual musical performances and significantly affect the resulting sound field of joint performance.

Lena Heng and Mengqi Wang have also been working on their Collaborative Student Grant project, "Sounding the interaction of cultures: Orchestration techniques and perceptual effects." Compositions for a solo Chinese instrument with the Western orchestra require the composer to consider ways in which orchestration techniques might function in different ways.

Gabriel Couturier and Martin Daigle have been hard at work on the project for which they were awarded the Collaborative Student Project Grant! "Masque de fer" (Iron Mask) is in the final stages of composition. The research phase was fully recorded, generating an open-access extended technique resource that includes a stereo mix, the entire recording session, and the stems in 96 kHz or in 48 kHz.

Recording of three original pieces for guitar and electronics in McGill University’s Multi-Media Room (MMR), as part of a larger project researching dialectal variation as a source for musical creation.

As well, the team has been working to harmonize the OrchView data-format with the OrchARD data structure.

Currently conducting a pilot study of timbre in popular song and its interactions with musical form and texture.

A new round of the CORE project is now in motion at the Haute école de musique de Genève, McGill University, Université de Montréal, University of British Columbia, and University of Toronto.

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our third year of activities. I sincerely hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their research and creative activities in spite of the continuing pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course have been virtual and yet again this year's workshop is online. In spite of these challenges, many of the collaborative workgroups have been very active demonstrating once again the resourcefulness and devotion of our community to our common passion.

Hello! As usual, lots going on here, but this month is an especially exciting one as we gear up for our ACTOR Year 3 Workshop, which will be held virtually the week of July 12. The annual workshops are an opportunity for ACTOR members to connect, collaborate, and plan for the upcoming year. We are looking forward to discussing updates on projects that have been rolling along for a few years now…

In 2019, Miller Puckette and I received a joint award from UC San Diego’s Committee on Research to undertake a project with two primary goals: the ability to accurately track a timbrically complex, two- part continuity, that was constantly varying while being generated from the same physical source, a cello. The ability to differentiate the two “parts” of a performed succession of double-stops that continuously alter their pitch, their dynamic balance, and their timbral profile will, in-turn, allow the composition of a musical composition for live cellist and a duo partner who is a computer musician managing the constant transformation of live events by selected algorhythms (in particular a spectrally sculpting one named THINNR).

The first Timbre and Orchestration Taxonomies Workshop was held virtually 29–31 May. Over the first two days, participants gave presentations using Maurice Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso as the shared reference for each method. This pluralistic approach brought up engaging questions and facilitated discussions about the unique qualities of each taxonomic system. The third day was devoted to group discussion and proved to be intellectually stimulating and invigorating for all.

Hi, all! Lots to report in terms of ACTOR activities in the past months, so I thought I’d write about some of our ongoing projects and what I’ve been working on as the ACTOR Analysis postdoc—and take the opportunity to share some photos from my favorite Spring hobby: gardening!

Hi, everyone! It’s been a great first two and a half months or so post-doc-ing up here at McGill, though we’ve been in pandemic shut-down mode for most of that time.

Lindsey here, reporting on a fantastic virtual conference that took place last week, September 3–4, “Timbre 2020.” While it was certainly disappointing not to be gathering in Greece as planned, this second international conference on timbre was still a golden opportunity for #timbregeeks around the world to gather together and share their latest discoveries.

I am Matthew Zeller, one of the new ACTOR postdocs (along with Lindsey Reymore) here at McGill. I’ll be working in the Output Innovation Axis to develop music- theoretic frameworks of timbre’s role in music, pedagogical tools, as well as musical and cultural exchanges through the lens of timbre studies.

Hello, all! My name is Lindsey Reymore, and I am one of the new post-docs at McGill on the ACTOR project along with Matt Zeller. I’ll be working in the Analysis Axis, helping to create new projects while continuing my research on timbre semantics, cross-modal correspondences, and timbre/orchestration-focused musical analysis.

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our second year of activities. I hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their activities in spite of the challenges presented by the pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course had to go virtual as did this year's workshop, but everyone rose the challenge as best as circumstances allowed, and this year's slate of workgroups is a testament to the resourcefulness and devotion of our community.

What a summer! One of the busiest of my life, with no clear beginning or end: the barrage of projects rolled from the spring straight into summer and through to the fall, as though it was just one continuous end-of-semester crunch. While there was nothing like an actual break to speak of, there was certainly a lot of travel. My ACTOR-related activities brought me to amazing events in four different countries, with fascinating people from all around the world….

Forty ACTOR members from seven countries gathered in Paris, France from 13-15 July at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou for the second annual ACTOR Workshop. This year’s activities included a special session devoted to the work of student members.

ACTOR scholars and artists introduced the project to a French public this June with “Orchestration and the ACTOR Project,” a study day hosted by the Paris research center IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) as part of the June 2019 ManiFeste-2020 festival.

Between Speech and Music: Composing for the Guitar with Dialectal Patterns

Before my PhD, I played guitar a little bit: enough to accompany myself at open mic, but not enough to compose for it seriously. I never really felt like I got the instrument: I found it hard to visualize what is possible in terms of fingering, and I didn’t have a clear mental image of the vast range of timbral variations of which the instrument is capable….

Hi there, my name is Julie Delisle, and I recently began to work on the ACTOR project as a post-doc on the Analysis Axis with Stephen McAdams and Bob Hasegawa. I feel very lucky to be part of this ambitious and really exciting research project!

Hey folks, Jason Noble here.  I’m one of the postdocs with the ACTOR project, working with Bob Hasegawa and Stephen McAdams on the Output Innovation axis.  I’m thrilled to be part of this project!   

I’ve been part of the Music Perception and Cognition Lab at McGill for several years now,