Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #1

Project Blog | Postdoc | Jason Noble | November 23, 2018

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, and we’ve always had a thing for timbre here (we even had “timbre geek” t-shirts printed!).  It’s great to know that there are so many other folks at institutions around the world who share our excitement for musical sound and its many dimensions, associations, and representations.  A lot of truly amazing minds have been brought together under the ACTOR banner, and I’m so excited to see what they come up with over the coming years!

Part of my role will be to apply the new tools and findings of the ACTOR project to my own research and composition.  Another part will be helping to disseminate the scholarly papers and research projects of ACTOR partners.  But since there are many people who are interested in timbre and orchestration but are not experts in the field, a third part will be to create social media content to help introduce a broader public to the things that we find so interesting. 

There will be a series “amazing moments in timbre,” musical moments that we feel are exceptional demonstrations of acoustic and/or electronic orchestration.  There will also be a series of posts introducing orchestration- and timbre-related terms, explaining them simply and clearly for a general audience, and providing links to more detailed explanations and applications for timbre-geeks-in-training.  If you have suggestions for either of these series, or any other ideas for content related to the ACTOR project, please e-mail us at actor-project.music[at]mcgill.ca!  We would love to hear from you, and we’ll do our best to feature your suggestions on ACTOR social media.