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I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our fourth year of activities. As we transition back to some form of normal life again, many of the collaborative workgroups have been very active, demonstrating once again the resourcefulness and devotion of our community to our common passion.

The aim of their project is to evaluate musical blend in choral performance from both signal and perceptual analysis methods. They will analyze choral blend on two levels: at the sound source level and the room acoustic level. The influence of feedback from the acoustic environment—along with coordinated performance strategies between musicians—is observed to have a high impact on individual musical performances and significantly affect the resulting sound field of joint performance.

Lena Heng and Mengqi Wang have also been working on their Collaborative Student Grant project, "Sounding the interaction of cultures: Orchestration techniques and perceptual effects." Compositions for a solo Chinese instrument with the Western orchestra require the composer to consider ways in which orchestration techniques might function in different ways.

Gabriel Couturier and Martin Daigle have been hard at work on the project for which they were awarded the Collaborative Student Project Grant! "Masque de fer" (Iron Mask) is in the final stages of composition. The research phase was fully recorded, generating an open-access extended technique resource that includes a stereo mix, the entire recording session, and the stems in 96 kHz or in 48 kHz.

Recording of three original pieces for guitar and electronics in McGill University’s Multi-Media Room (MMR), as part of a larger project researching dialectal variation as a source for musical creation.

As well, the team has been working to harmonize the OrchView data-format with the OrchARD data structure.

A new round of the CORE project is now in motion at the Haute école de musique de Genève, McGill University, Université de Montréal, University of British Columbia, and University of Toronto.

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our third year of activities. I sincerely hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their research and creative activities in spite of the continuing pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course have been virtual and yet again this year's workshop is online. In spite of these challenges, many of the collaborative workgroups have been very active demonstrating once again the resourcefulness and devotion of our community to our common passion.

I would like to welcome to all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our second year of activities. I hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their activities in spite of the challenges presented by the pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course had to go virtual as did this year's workshop, but everyone rose the challenge as best as circumstances allowed, and this year's slate of workgroups is a testament to the resourcefulness and devotion of our community.

What a summer! One of the busiest of my life, with no clear beginning or end: the barrage of projects rolled from the spring straight into summer and through to the fall, as though it was just one continuous end-of-semester crunch. While there was nothing like an actual break to speak of, there was certainly a lot of travel. My ACTOR-related activities brought me to amazing events in four different countries, with fascinating people from all around the world….

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,