TOSS brief description of activities
Project Blog | School and Conference Summary
By Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez
August 2, 2023
From July 9-12 the first Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS) took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, organized by ACTOR postdocs Ben Duinker and Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, and UdeM postdoc Kit Soden. The summer school was hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with on-site support by Asteris Zacharakis and was held around the TIMBRE 2023 conference. 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 ensuing three days were connected to the TIMBRE 2023 conference. In the first day of the summer school, Stephen McAdams presented a practical tutorial on taxonomies of orchestration according to perceptual principles in which several student groups discussed the way they heard the assigned passages from Alborada del Gracioso by Ravel and made annotations using Orchview. UCLA Prof. Nina Eidsheim presented a thought-provoking tutorial on vocal timbre focusing on how listeners assign meaning to vocal qualities according to cultural cues such as race, class, gender, origin, etc. In the second part of her tutorial, students answered questions in pairs to several prompts related to the vocal quality of a voice they had chosen in a preparatory assignment as a means of highlighting the way listeners relate vocal qualities they hear. Kit Soden presented a theoretical framework for timbre classification — metatimbres and paratimbres — and how they are applied in orchestral works and Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez presented several approaches to orchestration practices by composers of different avant-garde movements in the 20th and 21st centuries in a joint tutorial on orchestration and composition. The second day of the summer school began with a tutorial on signal processing, presented by Marcelo Caetano. This tutorial offered a thorough and methodic introduction to relevant digital signal analysis techniques that relate to timbral feature extraction, computational timbre descriptors, and current uses of computer aided orchestration. Caetano’s tutorial provided an accessible yet robust fundament for those who are not acquainted with music information retrieval. The second tutorial, this one on timbre semantics, was presented in tandem by Zachary Wallmark and Lindsey Reymore. In their tutorial, Reymore and Wallmark asked the students to describe individually, and then discuss in pairs, several musical examples. The collection of words served to discuss in a group setting how words relate to different elements pertaining to timbral qualities in terms of affect, sound production, cross-modal metaphors, etc. The last tutorial on analysis of orchestration was presented by Ben Duinker and Bob Hasegawa. Duinker presented on the analysis of Trap music, both in terms of the musical content and the role of live-performance, in the context of production-as-orchestration. Hasegawa presented a thorough analysis of Rebecca Saunders’ composition “Skin” for soprano and mixed ensemble.
Following the last tutorial of the summer school, and in preparation for the TIMBRE 2023 conference, McAdams and Hasegawa co-presented on the issue of consilience between humanities, arts, and science. This bridging event was meant to prepare the students for the ensuing conference and to invite them to reflect on this topic throughout the conference in preparation for the final joint event between TIMBRE 2023 and TOSS, a roundtable featuring prominent scholars ⏤both senior and early career scholars⏤ in timbre research in which question gathered by the students were discussed and addressed. The roundtable participants answered questions posed by the students concerning issues related to the topic of conciliation between the different disciplines, inclusivity and ethical practices, and addressed different challenges faced by scholars with respect to research methodologies, scope, and issues of disciplinary bias in relation to multi-disciplinary research projects in the field of timbre research. This final activity of the summer school and conference left a strong impression in the attendees and ended the very productive five days on a high note (on a brilliant timbre ⏤pun intended!). As part of the organizing committee of the summer school, we are very proud of this accomplishment, and we are very thankful with the tutors involved as well as with everyone who supported the event along the way. The ACTOR Central Committee is currently exploring options for future iterations of the Summer School. We are convinced that it is an important formative workshop for young research scholars, and music practitioners.
