Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #8
Project Blog | Postdoc | Lindsey Reymore | November 14, 2020
14 Nov 2020
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. A big shout out to Bennett Smith (the Technical Manager of McGill’s Music Perception and Cognition lab), for being my Mont Royal hiking buddy (photos below!), which has helped keep me relatively sane.
The bright side, though, is that there’s been lots of time to work on ACTOR projects and research! We’ve had great planning sessions for many of the teams within ACTOR in the past few months, such as for the Composer-performer Research Ensembles (CORE) analysis projects and the diversity & inclusion working group. A group of us who participated in beta testing for OrchView over the summer have been meeting every few weeks to review the analyses we did, and the OrchView programming team has been hard at work improving the software. Juanita Marchand has led the formation of a new working group focused on vocal timbre and orchestration, which has generated a lot of enthusiasm. And our monthly ACTOR central meetings have been a great way to keep abreast of all of the different projects underway! We released an October newsletter and are gearing up to release newsletters every 1–2 months.
Personally, I’ve had a great time working on both old and new projects. I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to get articles and revisions out the door (check out my latest publication with co-equal-author Niels Christian Hansen). The Orchestral Timbre Semantics Validation Study and Database experiment will go online soon, and I’m enjoying a new collaborative project on timbre in pop music. I’ve also enjoyed attending virtual conferences of ISMIR (International Society for Music Information Retrieval) and SMT (Society for Music Theory) as well as participating in the WestGrid Research Computing School sessions online. I’m also very happy to be able to practice oboe regularly and have been attending Zoom McGill studio classes, which has also led me into a very fun project analyzing new pieces from Professor Jacqueline Leclair’s new album for solo English horn, Music for English Horn Alone. Check out my blog for the ACTOR Amazing Moments in Timbre (AMiT) series discussing parts of my first analysis on the piece different forms of phosophorus.
It’s getting chilly outside! We’ve had a few snow flurries, though last week was quite warm again. I keep miscalculating how many layers I need, in both directions. More updates soon on ACTOR projects and whether I manage to survive the Montréal winter.
