Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #10

Project Blog | Postdoc | Lindsey Reymore | June 15, 2021

June 15, 2021

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—such as the CORE project (Composer-performer orchestration research ensembles), Orchidea (a project focused on computer-aided and target-based orchestration), and the online Timbre and Orchestration Resource. We’re also enthusiastic to share initiatives from the past year, including the Diversity Working Group, Voice Working Group, and a session on Timbre & Orchestration course design.

With respect to research, things have been gearing up for our collaborative project which recently received ACTOR Strategic Project funding, titled “Interactions of Timbre, Genre, and Form in Popular Music.” To start, we’re building four “satellite” corpora (collections of songs) representing pop, hip-hop, metal, and country so that we can better understand how timbre works within and across different genres. The group, which started as a collaboration among myself, ACTOR postdoc Matt Zeller, and McGill professor Nicole Biamonte, has grown into a dynamic research team including nine researchers from five different universities in Canada and the US. Additionally, the ACTOR funding offers us the means to hire ten graduate research assistants from ACTOR partner institutions to do aural analysis of songs and encode information related to timbre, texture, and instrumentation. We are currently working on developing the encoding scheme and building our student team, and we look forward to bringing it all together over the next few months.

Other than that, lots to work on with article revisions, analyses, collecting data via Zoom experiments, and honing new experimental designs. I’ve just returned to Canada, and so I am one week into quarantine—lots of time to get research done (and practice with Duolingo), of course, but I can’t wait to get out and walk around, go up Mont Royal, and hopefully have some in-person research meetings soon!

- Lindsey

The author’s quarantine view