Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #5
Project Blog | Postdoc | Lindsey Reymore | August 20, 2020
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 starting September 1st, 2020.
I received my PhD in May from the Ohio State University in Music Theory, where I was a member of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory. My dissertation, "Empirical approaches to timbre semantics as a foundation for musical analysis,” examines meaning (semantics) in instrumental timbre and how people communicate about this meaning (linguistics). The dissertation reports the results of several studies of timbre cognition and then draws these threads together to create a method of music analysis rooted in timbre semantics. One of my goals in future research is to apply this method and other computational methods in corpus studies, a type of research in which I’ll be able to test hypotheses related to timbre/orchestration by processing data from many pieces of music. ACTOR’s Orchview project and Orchid analyses will be especially integral to this effort!
As a researcher, I really value and enjoy collaborative science, especially when I have the opportunity to work with individuals across disciplines. I love the multidisciplinary nature of ACTOR, and I’m looking forward to meeting and working with individuals in many different fields from around the globe. I’m also an oboist (my BMus and MM are in oboe performance), and so I hope to have the opportunity to work with composers in ACTOR as a musician as well as a researcher.
I’m very excited to be in Montreal, though of course since I just arrived from the US, I’ve been in quarantine—one week down, one to go—and haven’t left my apartment yet. I’m lucky to have an amazing view, but I can’t wait to get out and explore the city (safely, of course). Moving to a new country during a pandemic is definitely an uncanny experience, but I’m settling in, as is my cat, Claudette. Getting back into the swing of things with writing and, of course, the now quintessential Zoom meetings! In future blog posts, I’ll be giving behind-the-scenes views of ongoing research projects both to update readers on ACTOR projects and to provide vignettes of what it is like to do research in music theory and cognition. Also keep an eye out for updates to the continuously evolving Timbre and Orchestration Resource on the ACTOR website, which I’ll also be helping to develop!
